But even Demon's Crest has the ability to hover as a core gameplay mechanic. (In fact, I believe you can hover infinitely right from the start, unlike the Gargoyle's Quest games where you can only hover for a limited time until you reach the final dungeon.)

(Incidentally, you also see this sort of limited hover mechanic in Doki Doki Panic/Super Mario Bros. USA, provided you play as a certain character (the princess if playing SMBUSA).)

I think they were comparing the structural mechanics of the game rather than the movement mechanics.

Just to be clear, what I meant was an overall structure of levels, just to say that is not a continuous world like Castlevania 2. Even then Odallus is more linear than Mega Man X, because you cannot select any stage you want from the beginning.

(by the way, you can't hover like Firebrand, but mid-game you gain an ability to glide - kinda like Batman)

I happened to check the Steam page for 8doors to make sure there weren't any updates we didn't get (there aren't) and noticed a mention of one game breaking bug that hasn't been fixed: if you and a boss die at the same time it will remember the boss as defeated but not trigger the cutscene that gives you a weapon you need to proceed. So try not to do that, however the save files are text format so it is possible to recover if it happens.

Also, I saw a post on the Steam forums that some video driver settings can fix the screen tearing so I tried a few things and I found on Radeon enabling both "Radeon Enhanced Sync" and "Radeon Anti-Lag" seems to produce a good result in a quick test (those might even be on by default but the default driver settings can cause trouble with games so I'm guessing I'm not the only one to turn off such things by default).

Hopefully these issues won't keep anyone from trying the game, it is one of my favorites and I highly recommend giving it a try.