I had a good time! The controls worked well, I like the visuals thus far, the songs are good and very catchy, the level design is nice, I think the boss is pretty good for what it is, the costume feature is a nice touch...
Sure, I'll admit, I did get a bit confused on where to go sometimes, but by the end of it I can safely conclude that's mostly a me problem for not being somebody with a particularly good sense of direction, the game did actually kinda try to clue me in on where it was that I needed to be going well enough I'm pretty sure, I just didn't have the sense of direction needed to always immediately catch onto what direction I needed to be going from there.
The fact that I was able to ultimately find my way around is probably a good sign the level design is doing something right when it comes to navigation because frankly my sense of direction can be terrible sometimes, and given the level isn't the most straightforward layout ever, that's definitely a good accomplishment to pull off in something a bit less linear.
And like... the radar feature thing generally helped me figure out how to fill in the gaps from there when I couldn't figure out where I specifically needed to go as well, I just sometimes needed a bit longer than if I'd just, y'know, used the other clues the game had right there a bit better. Really appreciate that mechanic for telling you what direction to be going and how close you are.
I probably have more thoughts I could get into but I'm a bit sleepy today due to not having slept the best and I'm not sure I can properly put the rest to words for the moment, might update later with better further thoughts if I can remember to but for now this should be good enough anyway, so if I forget to update this or just, can't think of more to say later, eh, probably good enough.
The emerald hunting comparison was mostly to emphasize the hot/cold mechanic and the amount of things to collect, and not really much more. As far as Ape Escape inspiration is concerned, you definitely did better there than last year too - I only remember being frustrated with the yellow(?) flying ones, but even that's only a matter of not chasing them off a cliff once you do eventually find them.
(side note, is this char limit annoying or what? lmao)