The demo has been updated with a number of small improvements.
26.2a:
All enemies have been added to the spawn pool, including those that only naturally spawn in later levels. This serves as a teaser for all the enemies in the game, provided you can enter apeiros.
Unique & improved music for each the levels present in the demo. I'd like to put a bit more work into these tracks but they're pretty representative. They're also probably a little divisive but hey the music volume slider is right there.
Random small bugfixes and QoL
cg art darkened, I found the old art distracting.
update 25.2b:
Æris shard connections now flash at you when you try to damage the æris core without having destroyed them. This hopefully makes it a little more obvious that they're protecting the core & have to be destroyed first.
I've also written a scoring guide that you can read here.
At this point the game is technically "done" internally—all art is completed and the levels are populated with appropriate enemies and bosses—but I've still got a lot of small things to implement to round out the experience, and general balance and polish are also important. The plan for release is still early Q2, probably early April; I'd just like to see February next fest through and have a bit of time after just in case.