While the game can be enjoyable at times, this is far out weighed by its many flaws:
- The control scheme for keyboards is very poorly implemented. You have Ctrl key for using Ness, which is not only extremely awkwardly placed compared to the other keys, but the Ctrl button, when used in conjunction with other keys (especially arrow keys), can cause other functions on the computer to activate (for example, on my computer, holding Ctrl and pressing the up arrow causes a screen to come up showing all the different windows I have open on my computer). You could have made the Right Mouse button Ness (or at least added an option to change the key assignments). Also, while you can move around with the arrow keys, you can't use the up arrow key to glide after unlocking the ability or move around Ness with the arrow keys.
- There's no option to mute the sound or to go back to the main menu. Also, there's nothing that tells you that Enter is the pause button.
- For the upgrades, while I understand that you don't want the player to change their upgrades for fear the player could redistribute their abilities at specific moments to easily overcome obstacles (such as maxing out bouncing, and then, after bouncing, switching the points to max out glide so you'd be able to gain massive height and distance). Still, couldn't you simply restrict redistribution of points to the one location and at least allowed players to distribute their points in the pause menu; that way, players wouldn't have to make their way back to the singular location to distribute points every time they find a tape (this would have especially been helpful earlier in my playthrough).
- Your earlier game "That Dream Again" worked well because you confined gameplay to a small area that the player was falling into, kind of like a pachinko machine. Back then, you could literally fall into powerups that made traversal easier and eventually would lead to upward momentum. Now the game's bigger and most of the areas you need to reach are above the player's starting position, all while they're still falling the same as always (and it looks awkward when you are bouncing along the rocks instead of standing on them). You've abandoned putting specific upgrades in areas and instead left tapes to upgrade as the player pleases (which is necessary if the player wants to win), but this almost seems to say "we don't know what ability should be upgraded in this area so we're going to leave that up to you, but since you need specific levels of upgrades to progress, we'll leave an inconvenient option for redistributing the points."
- While the game has the Recall ability, you have to unlock it instead of it being a freebie to account for the game's size. And, as I recall in the previous game, you gave players a map at some point not only showing their position, but the position of the obstacles and upgrades. In a game this large, that map is even more important and knowing where the obstacles are would help the player avoid them, instead of annoyingly running into them when trying to move upward because they moved in front of them (also, you don't indicate that you can bring up any type of map in the description. Maybe a character says it, but it seems rather important). Plus, it's very easy to lose your sense of direction when going between screens and end up missing something you were trying to navigate toward.
- Even with my movement skill fully maxed, it doesn't seem to allow the player to pull off the pin point accuracy you expect of them in bouncing on very small balloons (it almost feels like luck that I do it).
- The Ness ability just seems like a terrible choice for a mechanic in the game, especially considering the original move would usually only ever be used for traversal in that manner in desperate situations so to expect pin point accuracy in some areas is unreasonable. Right now, I'm drawing the line at the essentially "nothing but Ness" traversal section.
As much as I'd like to finish the game, the annoyances keep compounding, along with the aimless wandering and seemingly unfair setbacks where you need to re-tread old ground because you fell looking for things you missed. I wish you luck in your future projects.