In concept, I think this game is fine and could have worked, if exactly ONE change was made. I'll get to that in a bit.
The core mechanics are really cool - it really is like a cross of a platformer and a rhythm game, but doesn't quite feel like either of the two. It's color matching + figuring out which direction you want to move or bounce, and the multi-tiered level design means that mistakes aren't punished with death, just the inability to reach a higher path. That's good design. The difficulty curve is also fairly smooth - the lower-tier levels start off easy, get a bit harder in world 2, then by worlds 3 and 4 there's real challenge. And then world 5... okay, I'll get back to that. Promise. And the higher you go on the multi-tiered paths the harder the levels get, and staying there subsequently becomes even harder. I have some minor gripes with the control scheme - often I found myself dashing in the wrong direction and I think simply mapping LB and RB to left/right dash respectively instead of having them both be the same button would help a lot, and as well despite parts of this working well on control stick, often when you need a specific angle in a hurry it can be easy to be off by an 8th of the direction. Same reason I wouldn't play Celeste with a control stick, and I would've started this game the same way had I known that from the start. On the subject of controls, also, the fact that movement is mapped to the same stick as bounce aiming can lead to a lot of wrong inputs. Unfortunately I'm not sure how to solve this one as it would mean requiring you to take your hand off the face buttons to move the stick, so... I see -why- it was done this way, at least? The game also has an interesting & well-done scoring system that rewards, of all things, cautious, careful play - that's the thing, for as high-speed as the game looks on the surface, going fast is really not the goal, and in fact will just make your life harder. There are places where you do need to go fast, and you don't stay suspended forever, you'll eventually fall after each attack. It was cool to go back to the first level of the game after beating the game's hardest level and get a Z-rank in a single attempt, for instance. There's definitely a sense of skill improvement as the levels get harder that then makes earlier challenges a breeze, that's the kind of skill progression that feels good.
...however, it never feels good -in the moment-, because the game commits a level design sin that pretty much tanks any game that follows the same pattern. Namely, that the levels are TOO DANG LONG with no checkpoints whatsoever, barring the three-level boss fights which, yes, it's just three levels, essentially. The earlier worlds don't suffer from this quite so much but by world 4 and ESPECIALLY world 5's marathon levels, it gets incredibly frustrating to have to restart levels taking upwards of 90-120 seconds just because of one mistake near the end, forcing you to replay the earlier parts of the level you've already pretty much mastered and gotten bored of. Just so you can get another attempt to solve the platforming puzzle that's tripping you up later in the level. It doesn't help that your health feels weirdly low for this kind of level design - you start with 4 HP, and very occasionally there's a chance to replenish or raise that HP cap, but if you're taking the top routes, nope, good luck, you aren't ever gonna see a health refill. This is especially bad in levels where even one minor mistake locks you out of the top route when you need to be taking the top route to get to a specific next level, or in the final boss where the entire level is suspended over a bottomless pit. It turns what should be a fun skill-building game into a tedious slog where the coolness of the concept wears off quickly and ends up being more frustration than actual enjoyment. And yes, I did make sure to play every level the game had to offer, just to see how far it pushed that design ethos. No, I am not encouraged to go back and try to 100% the game, that sounds miserable. It also doesn't help that, a good chunk of the time, even if you build up skill, there will be weirdly designed level segments that you can't solve your first time around, but you're not given the time to figure out what to do other than to just keep replaying it until you do beat it. There is definitely an inherent level of skill building, but moreso it feels like half of getting good at the game is just level memorization. The stuff that gave you trouble when you couldn't figure it out often becomes easy once you do figure it out, just for the next segment to repeat the process over and over until you've figured out the entire level, but that will then fade by the time you're in the middle of learning the next level. It's not accumulated skill in the same way mastering the core mechanics are. It's not a fun kind of learning. It's the game slapping you on the wrist because you didn't answer a complex math problem within a half second and so it tells you to go back and resolve the last 10 problems you already solved just to get another chance to solve the 11th in .5 seconds again.
Also, it's irrelevant, but the general aesthetic of the game is... average, at best. The music is solid pump-up video game music and there's an element of a dynamic soundtrack but it all kind of sounds the same in the end. The level aesthetics also change but again they basically all look the same, because the defining point of the visual aesthetic of each level is the red/blue/yellow enemies more than the actual backgrounds. There's barely, BARELY a story, too. it's there but it doesn't... matter, it's never brought up except at the very start and very end of the game. Again, this doesn't really matter to my review as the whole, but I felt like commenting on it anyways.
So how do you fix the game, then? The level design ideas generally are not bad and there's a lot of variety in constructing different platforming challenges out of the same mechanics, but the later levels feel too overstuffed with ideas and pretty much all of them could've been cut in half, or more, to make several smaller levels. That could even increase the branching paths gimmick to allow for four, even five layers of levels, but each is a comfortable 45ish seconds at most rather than a grueling 2-minute marathon. I think that game would encourage more skill-based learning and less level-based learning as well as make for more dynamic playthroughs. It'd still be challenging enough to make sure the player is actually learning how to play the game and solve the levels, but not so much so that they get bored or frustrated having to restart the same easy part of the same long level for the fiftieth time. And this doesn't necessarily remove any existing content either, it just reorganizes it into smaller chunks - wouldn't even impact the speedrunners, hell, it could make trying to figure out the best routes even more difficult and interesting. I think the concept would be worth expanding upon in a sequel if it was geared towards shorter levels and introduced more mechanics to make for a bit more variety, but the game we got isn't quite there in my opinion, and I found it more frustrating than fun to play even with how cool the concept itself should be. Oh well.
