v0.1.6.4. The art and the personality are nice. The gameplay is terrible.
The camera is too zoomed in. The camera moves up as soon as you jump, rather than waiting for you to land. You have to fight the camera. It makes sense to walk off some ledges instead of jumping off just so that the camera doesn't prevent you from seeing what you're trying to land on. Of course, the player's collision is a 2D capsule, instead of the standard rectangle, so you fall off ledges sooner than you'd expect, and get pushed away from the ledge a bit.
While momentum exists, you reach top speed almost instantly. There's no difference between a held jump button and a tapped jump button. After dashing, there's no way to maintain the dash momentum. This means there's basically no skill expression in the entirety of the platforming. It's entirely about how late you jump and when you hit dash. That's why another reviewer complained about "perfect jumps", despite the jumps not being very demanding. The only method the game has for making a jump challenging is to make it "perfect". Even exploration isn't rewarded. Any resemblance to a choice in traversal amounts to an immediate dead end with either some dialogue or once even an invisible wall.
Combat is similar. Attacking locks you into an animation. You have no influence over your movement until the animation is over. You can't cancel the animation early by jumping or dashing. You can't attack while mid-air. There's no buffering on dashes or attacking, so when you want to mix them together it results in a lot of dropped inputs. And it turns out this is really important because every enemy is fought with nearly exactly the same strategy. You only have one combo, three attacks that ends in a kick that knocks the enemy back. Every enemy has an easily reactable attack, and gets interrupted by being attacked. So, the way you play every single fight is to combo the enemy, then dash to get invincible frames and close the distance, repeat.
That is, if it wasn't more effective to just jump over the enemies head or dash through them and ignore them. None of the enemies are effective at all at stopping you from running past them (except for the boss fight that locks the escape). The enemies drop souls when you kill them, and you can spend those on upgrades, but it feels mostly superfluous. Combat isn't a challenge so why spend upgrades on it. Four dashes is plenty, so you don't need stamina.
I don't expect these things to change. It seems like the dev is focused on creating more content, rather than first creating systems that demand content to be explored.
I liked that the volume started out not maxed out. I was annoyed that clicking didn't advance text in the intro cutscene but instantly skipped it (I'd rather require hold to skip and do nothing on tap). Having keybinding options is nice, because I hate the default wasd option.