Geez the art style looks really neat for this, it's very familiar (having a similar feel to RPGMaker stuff) but unique and in it's own style and I'm digging it

Any recommendation on whether or not to start with the official version or the plus version? I'm going with trying plus for now.

Also I should note that your link to the plus version is broken, if I found the correct thing (and I'm not sure why I wouldn't have) it seems to be on 1.17 now as well, pretty good progress for being 1.14 a month ago (I'll assume that each .1 they add is a more-or-less "full" update and not just small bug fixes since those usually seem to be more along the lines of 0.0.1).

(All of these were done on the PS3 version of the game)

• Flowers don't always respawn properly. Observed in the secret "Fireworks" area of the intermission where several red flowers are on screen at once. Might only effect this one room.
• You can open the inventory and the map (and possibly the pause screen as well, I haven't checked) at the same time, so I might go to close my map, and find that the inventory opens instead, and then flail around on the buttons for a while before I gain the composure to figure out the right order to get back to the game. Would be fixable by making each menu button tell every other menu to close when pressed.
• It is possible to sequence break and get the Night Sphere before doing Malie's second quest, possibly even her first. By activating the switch at 38x19 and going through the secret passage in 40x17, you can get through the intended one-way door and get the item, and also see a huge spoiler. Fixable by swapping the green switch with a white switch that only opens after you pick up the sphere.
• Speaking of white switches, it's not a bug of any kind, but I notice some of them have buttons to open them and others open only by some special trigger (or just walking towards them from the correct side). It would be nice if doors with switches had a different design/color to them so when I see them I know whether or not they have a switch that I have to find and manually press, and if they open from one side it would be cool if they had a design to them to denote which side you have to come from (other than just figuring it out via the level geometry).
  

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As for my thought about how the game was structured, I honestly think that the "Chapters" method of segmenting the game wasn't the best choice. Chapters 1 and 2 are very much prologues or set-up for the story, and tutorials for the gameplay (though as tutorials they're some of the best I've seen). The problem is that branding them the way they were is it brings a lot of expectations to the player, which are all wrong. These expectations include thinking Ch.1 and 2 make up two thirds of the game (obviously wrong), that there will be tons of fourth-wall breaking throughout the whole game (which a lot of people don't enjoy for the sake of immersion, though it stops really happening in Ch.3) and that the game is just not as awesome as it actually is (let's face it, Mi+Bob allow for much MUCH better control and mobility than either alone). Also, Chapter 3 is the most annoying to climb to from The Hub, despite being the most visited area of the entire menu, that's not too awful, but it's still not great.

Now my concerns and reason for bringing this up is I'm worried that these small things are going to make a huge difference to potential players. I know when I first started playing I took note of how short chapter 1 and 2 were and how "eh" they actually were to play (and at that point was admittedly really thankful that I kinda didn't pay any money for the game since it was bought with a voucher Sony sent me, which before anyone asks DOES count as technically buying the game and is a sale and profit for the developers, I just didn't lose anything for it, which is good because I was broke at the time) and it wasn't until chapter 3 started up that I really began to enjoy everything about the game. Obviously I got to the good part, but I'm afraid that if I had played the demo that came out after I already bought it, I might had not bought it at all (ok that's unlikely because I've been a fan of Knytt Stories for a really long time and generally enjoy all of Nifflas' work, but other people who aren't so familiar might not have the same faith in the Niff, or even know what a Niff is for that matter).

So what I'm trying to say is I'm afraid that the way the "Prologue" is portrayed will make potential buyers/players/fans expect less from the core game and miss out on a great experience.

Also, completely unrelated, while I was proof-reading this the term "Niff Stories" popped into my head and I'm wishing I could give Juni a beard (although I haven't played it yet,  it kinda looks like The Great Work might be a kind of Niff Stories,  just look at his beard).

The Figure was pretty hit and miss for me. There were a lot of neat challenges in it, but overall I feel like only having one save point before each "set" makes it kind of mind-numbing.

Challenges that stick out in my mind as really bad for that are (and forgive me for not remembering the names) the red-walled one where you have to aim and control yourself perfectly and use a bunch of the flower power ups in succession, which took me probably an hour just on that challenge because I'd die from being a tiny bit off and have to reset, and then as soon as I got it down and made progress I'd not know what to do because new territory, then die, then repeat messing up the first two screens.

The other one that stuck out as kind of bad was the orange-walled one with all the robots. It was made with two really easy, but boring/time wasting rooms at the start, then one really hard room, and then I think it went on to bouncing off ramps, but that might have been a different challenge. Nonetheless, every time I died in that one hard room I had to redo those really boring rooms that just wasted my time over and over again.

I respect difficulty, I'm even working on a Knytt Stories level that might equal or surpass The Figure in difficulty, but I hate having to deal with endurance, and prefer to have a save spot after every challenge. It's no fun doing the same rooms over and over again because you didn't finish a room that comes AFTER them.