Played this demo and had a pretty positive experience with it, clearing all of the content and finding (I think) all of the collectables in about an hour, then another time through to write this. The big draw was obviously the beautiful artwork, kind of Adventure Time-y, but the level also had a good logical progression of mechanics being taught and expanded upon - I'd love to see a bit more of the more macro-scale exploration and world layout, since this experience was cordoned off to just one series of rooms. The difficulty was mostly about right, with the boss maybe a little on the simpler side compared to the platforming before it. The NPCs, although presumably we're not seeing the main plot-centric characters in this segment, felt like they were written with a lot of personality that matched what was conveyed visually - I like how they're chatty and colorful in a genre that often falls back on cryptic and distant characters.

Overall, it was a very polished game that really set itself apart in terms of theme and vibe compared to a lot of similar titles, and I'm looking forward to seeing the full release. Apart from minor bugs and QOL (the tutorial messages were messed up after I rebound keys, for instance), I'll go over the concerns I did have while playing.


I DON'T GET THE HEALING SYSTEM
Or rather, I get how it works, but I don't understand the point of it. It charges up exclusively with the same items that refill my health normally, so I'm not converting resources. It works instantly, so there's no risk in using it or need to find a safe spot to heal. At least in this demo, there's nothing else that uses the healing charge, so I'm not making a decision about how to spend it. It seems like for all intents and purposes, it might as well just be a ~30% longer HP bar with no self-heal ability. Not to be the "it uses background and foreground layers kinda the same way, so I'mma compare every single other aspect of it to Hollow Knight" guy, but for Hollow Knight, I can see the healing mechanics having a clear impact on the moment-to-moment gameplay with tradeoffs the player has to make, and I just don't get what interesting ways this system is supposed to be interacted with.

There was also a real feast-or-famine problem with the healing items themselves. In rooms with relatively light challenges, they often litter the floor with way more than I could possibly use, and then in rooms where I actually take damage and need healing, there's nothing. In the ultra-tough platforming challenge for the health upgrade, there were a grand total of three feathers available - not even enough to fill a healing charge! - and not a single one of them accessible from the midway checkpoint.

The lack of renewable healing also worked strangely with the Persevere ability, because it became the only means of restoring HP for future challenges without backtracking to a save point or for pots to break. While doing the platforming challenge, after dying once I found myself just immediately spamming paint slashes until I died any time I took damage before the checkpoint, because otherwise when I finally did manage to make it there, I'd have even fewer tries at the second half - and with the reduced HP bar, you already only get four mistakes before you die and lose the checkpoint again, even at maximum.


MANOEUVRABILITY
Your fall speed is pretty fast and your air control is pretty low, which makes it very hard to correct yourself in the aid or to react while falling down. I think a lot of the platforming difficulties were contributed to in large part by this; having to make very quickly-timed jumps is one thing, but having to do so without much ability to correct yourself after jumping is much harder, and in the worst cases could make it feel like trial-and-error learning the correct spots to jump rather than naturally flowing through and reacting to challenges as they come.

Combined with the lack of angled standard attacks, fighting flying enemies felt extremely obnoxious, especially on small platforms. Instead of being able to engage them fluently, it often felt like my best option was to play in a very boring way, hitting them once at maximum stab distance and then running all the way away before repeating. On the ground, only using jumps reactively, to evade, control feels a lot more smooth, which makes it feel like one way the game is differentiating itself from similar titles is being focusing more on grounded combat options - definitely the polar opposite of "MIO: Memories in Orbit", the demo I played immediately before this one. One problem I did have was with the grounded dash - it often felt like the enemy movement made having the right spacing to actually use it rather unreliable, so again I'd end up resorting to hit-and-run-away instead of trying for cool dash-through-and-strike manoeuvres. Having it be just a tiny bit longer or a couple more iframes at the end might help.


THAT ONE BIT
I know that you know which bit I'm talking about. When I said "the difficulty was mostly about right", the "mostly" was this crazy Path of Pain room that somehow ended up here hiding a health upgrade. An additional checkpointable platform just before you have to double back to the left would do wonders, as would having more than basically zero health restoration nearby, especially once you've hit a checkpoint. Even then, several of the jumps felt a little too precise to be fun, especially with how limited your air control is; the part before the horizontal corruption where you have to dodge up and around two corruption balls springs to mind, as does the very final jump avoiding the desynced ball, which I've managed twice now and am still pretty sure was a fluke both times.

THOSE DOOR SWITCHES
Nope. Nope. Nope.
Having to work out the right order based on the length of the wire? Sure, that's an interesting puzzle, and I could see how it could be further developed in the future with obstacles along the wire that have to be cleared as it goes. Having to do them all quickly in succession? Yep, that's an interesting platforming challenge that recontextualizes relatively simply obstacles, as you now have to path through them much faster and on a specific route. Having to get nigh frame-perfect timing on each one? Nah, that's just annoying. Feels like I'm playing "guess what the developer was thinking" trying to guess the exact same jumps the designer used when creating it, and even then it takes a dozen or so attempts until I fluke a run with exactly perfect timing - and all to open a door that *I already know how to open*.