SAGE 2024 - Demo Honey Bunny (Sage 2024 Demo)

On the technical level, Honey Bunny gets everything right: it's not just that the game has good art direction, soundtrack and mechanics, it's that those things blend together to make something more coherent an immersive.
You're a bunny girl in a casino attacked by gangsters, you run on poker tables, jump on castles of cards that crumble when you move the wrong card, roulette wheels are spinning platforms, and this is just the first level.
Later levels will introduce more casino-related themes and relative mechanics and Honey Bunny is pretty good at making everything feel like it's in the right place.

What's holding me from giving this game 5 stars is the fact that I struggle to see the whole vision regarding game design.
You see, Honey Bunny is a standard 3D platformer, your objective is to get to the end of the level, but the levels vary between having a lot of multiple paths and secrets, to be outright open.
Which isn't a problem at all of course, more game to play, good!
But what lies in all of this non mandatory space? Well you get cherries (this game's equivalent to Mario's coins), power ups and extra lives. No permanent collectibles yet like, I don't know, the big coins/green stars from Mario or red star rings from Sonic.
The only reason to get those cherries is to get a better rank at the end of the level, but that also evaluates your time, and getting all the cherries is very time consuming.
So am I supposed to speedrun, collect or a bit of both?
I don't understand how the game wants me to play it is what I'm trying to say.

Even when considering rewards I feel the game misses something, I don't really care about extra lives or health, so no extrinsic reward, and as for intrinsic reward, the movement, while perfectly fine, it's no super Mario 64, you have a jump, an attack and some sort of grappling hook, let's call it that, it's good, but nothing that makes me want to mess around and experiment with it for a while.

I have some minor complaints about the invincibility effect that makes seeing what's on the screen too hard, I get it that you're drunk, but maybe it's a bit much, and the transition from normal camera to TPS mode, I think it would be less confusing if it was the character to turn in the direction of the camera and not the other way around, but maybe it's just me.

I'm being a bit negative, but I truly think this game can be even better than what it is, it just needs the spark, you know, I'm looking forward to see how Honey Bunny will evolve in the future.