Tldr: This game is almost perfect for what it is. If you're looking for a small platformer with tight controls and challenging gameplay, charming art and story, as well as a good soundtrack and a few tiny content-additions, this is very well worth full price. Recommended!
Review: Going by the "deceiving" name, the game becomes quite challenging until you get into the motion, from that on it isn't really difficult per se. I've never 100% a game like this, so that should tell something. It's also very polished, which makes for a great experience. There are some missed opportunities and slight missteps, though. I will call all that 'nitpicking' and list it below for interested readers (and maybe the devs).
- Controls: While very responsive for how the game plays, it can have issues. Hitboxes around edges can be wonky. While I can disregard failing to an enemy because I touched the edge of their sprite as whatever, only happening a few times, not being able to break blocks because I hit them at their side corners gets tedious. In the same spirit, while wall jumping works and the character even tends to "climb" the edge if necessary, landing a few pixels too high on it, makes you unable to jump again, which made me fall into spikes more often than was enjoyable.
- Difficulty is a bit awkward. The game is actually never difficult, only fairly challenging. But than you have these forsaken sawblade rooms in almost every biome, which are just that big (or the ceiling too low), that it becomes a matter of jumping withing the correct 2 frames of running. If you blink in between, you are already too close, otherwise too far, missing that perfect curve to not get shredded. It became less skill and more of a "dps check" - if you did it you can continue, if you failed "too bad". Obviously, those things become only really apparent on "Hard Mode", as usually you can respawn often enough to just shrug it off.
- Level design is improvable. It is great while playing - but sometimes spots look like potential secrets, while others come out of nowhere. All of them also seem at least to be randomly placed for each run, sometimes you have empty rooms (especially on hard without life drops), and sometimes I had boxes below me where I couldn't figure out how to break them, as there seemed no way to throw below you.
- Acorns: Works really well. But for everything holy, why does it have to stop short just close before the spot you want to hit. Limiting the reach of it is important for the challenge of the game, but when spots get unnecessarily more difficult at times because you can only reach about a quarter of the screen, it not only feels unsatisfying, but also makes the character feel weak in the progress.
- Weakness: I don't like how you loose your double jump when having hit an enemy by landing on them. It's a design decision that has made every game worse that I have played with it. I would always recommend making a character feel powerful, while also managing the tight balance of limiting it just enough for the levels to work.
- Bosses: Enjoyable, however the first two seem quite chaotic. I am aware that this is just not my style of "pattern studying", but in a game where you are always a one-hit and the hp bar of the boss replenishes completely, my only way of beating them was to just ignore whatever they were doing completely and waiting for that 2 second window I could attack them. Then, on the other hand, we come to the other half of bosses, which suddenly become way easier because they do not act as wild around the screen, and put the "here is my pattern for you" technique way more into the foreground. It all works, but may invite into figuring out what style of boss behaviour actually fits the most into the style the game is going with.
- Length: The game could have profited from a 5th area. The game makes it up with not only a - seemingly - randomly generated "parkour" area, but also a dev room where you can easily select the part of the game you like. Which was really lovely.
- Design / Polish: Why do I unlock a parkour giving me limitless hearts and acorns, but 1 meter away I can enter the dev room where I can buy 999 of each of them for free? Maybe they were unlocked by different conditions, but I don't know because the game never notified me, so I only stumbled upon it when restarting for the last achievements. Speaking of which: I don't think it is intended that you can cheese some of them via the dev room. I will admit: I had no shame abusing the free shop items. The 100 shop achievement is ridiculous, as it is the only think keeping you from completing by forcing you to basically play the game another 5+ rounds. I would not mind replayability via achievements, but this is the wrong and only one. I also skipped one particular achievement that way, because I was curious if it would work - but played it legit afterwards as it provided a clever challenge worth replaying the game for. Lastly, I noticed the idle animation playing while throwing acorns. Unimportant, but it shows that the game could have benefited from a final round of polishing. I am also not sure if resetting the timer every time you fail makes a lot of sense, as it "misleads" what your final time is, as well as making one of the achievements unnecessarily harder to get.
- Balancing / Flow: Subjective, but I like games giving you an increasingly, steady challenge, while also making it possible to keep your flow after you got good at them. You still can take your time if you want, but you can do it fast. Most of the time, I could not continue running, because I would certainly hit one of the enemies or their projectiles. Difficulty was also interesting. I found the challenge in area 2 much less forgiving in both hard mode and pacifist challenge. Area 3 was really, really easy in comparison, and while Area 4 took me the longest in hard mode, it was mostly of silly mistakes (and the sawblade room).
- Opportunities: While you have to stop somewhere, some things could have been addressed without an increased workload: Another difficulty before 'Hard'. The skip between normal and hard was huge, giving another run in a game that is based on getting you into the actual challenge could have been fun. Maybe a 3-life only version. Also: A toggle for each difficulty to add a respective timer per biome/screen: If it runs out, you fail the same as getting hit. It would have been a push for speedruns. Also: A fail-counter, either next to the items in the hud, or in the pause screen. Finally: Some additional quality of life: 1. Let me toggle if I want to skip the game over screen - it got really tiring in hard mode. 2. Same spirit: I noticed the character stopping each screen instead of continuing running if you keep holding the direction button also hindered the flow of the game. Could be a toggle in the settings. Finally: More achievements for replayability: Beating certain times, finding all keys in a run, for the proposed time challenge, for defeating all enemies, collecting everything in a run. Hitting no golden boxes, if possible? Funny ones, like failing a room a number of times.
- Rest: Really, really minor translation mistakes. Adding a sign to know you can leave the dream area (as you normally cannot do that in the regular game). I think that should be "most of it".
Overall: I wouldn't have written all that if the game didn't impress me. And I want to stretch that this is nitpicking at its finest. The game is a solid 9.5 out of 10. Seeing that this is apparently the first full-fledged game of the devs, I can only respect what they have achieved here and congratulate them wholeheartedly. More people should play this, and I hope the devs have success in future endeavours.
