You know, I feel the experience is 50/50. Overall very good, don't be deceived, but I feel like there's some drawbacks to be had.
Let me just open with praise. Great music, great sounds, great visuals, original concepts, EXCELLENT level design, and a good breadth of content. It's masterpieces like this that make me dig around in the platformer section of NG to begin with. I could not rate this piece anything less than 8/10 on a clean conscious as proof of how damn good this piece is at its core.
The problem for me is style and philosophy. It gets hard as all hell. Borderline impossible in some feets. I'm straight up resigning on level 17 due to my dry eyes and cramped as hell wrists.
My single biggest gripe: Memorization and stealth spikes.
The timed spikes are one thing, but the proximity spikes have fast deploy times (needing to reaction in over 1/4 of a second or so is simply fatal, if even that), completely invisible nature, and eventual spam-tacular overuse simply grows absurd. I'm fine with a few levels using it, or maybe once or twice per level, but it just grows to a point where every other place you could set foot suddenly decides to murder you completely and utterly without warning.
That's fine, but they start appearing in places that are central to any kind of reprieve, or places where danger is not a theme. Adding a need to remember one trap laid out near blue switch X just makes you die and restart.
Does it add to the game's lifetime? Sure. But does it add any fun or true challenge outside of memory? Not really, in my honest opinion. And that's what gets me. I'm being kicked to curb out of almost pure sadism, and I get nothing in return out of the trade. Maybe it's just my tastes expecting something else, but for me this is a constant nuisance.
Secondarily: Long, long stretches of actions with no reprieve. I have never seen a platformer with as long of rapid fire hazards as this. It gets to be very exhausting, and you want a moment to catch your breath and recenter yourself, but that ends up not being given for considerable expanses of space. Moreover, even if it just comes down to memorizing it all, doing a few dozen chain actions to clear an area over 20 seconds requires immense focus and quite frankly leaves me wanting to blink one hell of a lot. It just ends up drying out my eyes more than I feel overtly challenged. It's really a cramp in how much I get into things before just feeling that the insanity is growing oversaturated. And after you clear one of these giant reflex piles? Well, you can bet there's another one waiting for you of comparable length.
Truth be told I'd love to keep digging into this game, but it's very taxing on the wrists and comfort to keep pursuing, and everything that goads me on to keep pressing myself just gets met with a lot of small annoyances that drive me further away.
I imagine I am the exception, but either way it's a good piece at it's core.
8/10, 4/5 ~WCCC