The controller mandate caused a hurdle where the camera became completely bugged when connecting my Dualshock 4. With bravery and fortitude I attempted the game with PC input and found that it worked fine. The first few minutes of the game involve acclimating myself to the floatiness of Diti's procedurally generated animations, as well as the unfortunate tail that occurs frequently on the dialogue chirping sound effect. With each new ability gained, I become slightly more unwieldy, which feels well featured for combat; in the case of traversal, I found myself discovering more invisible walls and more roll-spam sequience breaks, which is par for the course with such a densely populated level design, but could do with some more forethought and "foul play." The progression system finished out at the perfect time in the narrative, although the "memory marbles" seem somewhat contrived in achieving this particular beat (no spoilers). The Overseer boss and the final twist are good, if I knew how either of them resolved, but alas, I died, and the game didn't seem to be prepared to reset that fight, nor to save my data. It seems fitting to end my journey as it began; with a bug that prohibits the game's earliest instructions.
The game is exceptional in delivering satisfying Nerve combat, although the overabundance of blades in enemy's attacks leads to a relative scarcity or tedium in some areas to collect more, which causes the Land gameplay to suffer. This motivation is also hampered by the freedom of movement that is unaccounted for in the level design, especially in areas like the "purple floor" where the player's movement on the ground becomes as unstable as midair. Title cards for different areas were doing some heavy lifting in some instances of delineating them from each other, and the value of that structure goes underutilized where I think a more strictly linear level design would have engrossed me more in the narrative arc, as well. Structuring not only the final level design but the entire world design towards fighting the Overseer would have also sold me on the "descent into hell" vibes that the story is going for.
Risk of Rain 2 and Spongebob: Battle for Bikini Bottom are both games which share your genres. Each of them has a partisan focus on Nerve and Land motivations respectively; while their counterpart may be atrophied, they are large enough to mostly accommodate the excision of these less than enjoyable elements. In your case, you've succeeded in bringing those genres closer together with the same action set for combat and exploration, but now that means when one suffers, the sum of parts suffers all the more. You've at least got a more appealing unified action set than No Man's Sky's beam-based gameplay, and while 3D Sonic has as much of an obsession with rails as you do with saw blades on rails, they've never had a satisfying rail-grapple mechanic, so nice beaten punch there, Tristan.