It took me a while to enjoy this game, but then it clicked, and all of the sudden I was a speedrunner
There are a couple things holding this game back, though. The grapple approach that this game takes is an interesting one, it allows for a lot of flexibility, but also can feel very finicky. Moving the player directly toward the grapple point gives you the ability to stack momentum, but it also frequently feels "floaty". This is somewhat alleviated by the heavy control over lateral movement you have while grappling (which, to be fair, I'm not totally sure is a good thing). I don't know what would actually make it feel better to control, but in it's current state, it does hold the game back a bit. Some other things: The crystal hitboxes feel unfair at times, and the camera position smoothing takes away a lot of precision at high speeds. I think instead of smooth camera follow, it should lead ahead of the player at all times, which won't look as good, but will help the precision.
Overall, great game, I played it for much longer that I do most jam games
Viewing post in The Crystal Cycle jam comments
Yeah we spend a lot of time on trying to get the hammer mechanics to feel good, I think we would have needed an entire rework on it to feel really nice. We did do playtesting, but I wish that we would have done more to get a better feel of how a general audience actually feels about it. I'm glad that if was able to click for you after some time.