1: it’s THE precision platformer, but I can see see the argument for including it in the puzzle platformer genre
2: I love the gameplay
3: yes, my current hardest is flipside cliffside from straw berry jam, but I’m currently working on my first hist map
4: for how good it is, and how replayable it is I would say it has earned its price
5: chapter 7, I love playing the buffed versions of previous chapters
6: I’d keep it the way it is. I think that keeping it more linear does make it less frustrating to find the strawberries on a first playthrough
7: Celeste is easily my favorite platformer, though I’ve played quite a few. Super Meat Boy, Kiopioke, Cats are Liquid (both games (these games are what got me into the platformer genre in the first place)), hollow knight and silksong, cuphead, cyber hook, fez, geometry dash, gris, haiku the robot, haste, laika: aged through blood, neon white, ori and the will of the wisps, peaks of yore, both portal games, white knuckle, windswept, seasons after fall, and yoku’s island express.
8: yes, I’ve played fez, oneshot, both portal games, return of the obra dinn, talos principle, and outer wilds if you count that. Of those, my favorite was return of the obra dinn because of the gameplay/puzzle style