Thanks very much for the detailed feedback!  

I wasn't super thrilled with the score UI myself, but it was one of those (many) things that after playing around with it for a bit I just said "it's good enough for now" and never got to go back to it as the deadline approached.  And I went back and forth a lot on whether to remove Theo from the title screen and the screenshots for exactly that reason, but ultimately I decided everything looked better with him in it.  (I then thought about cutting the joke because, as you rightly point out, it's completely spoiled before you even start the game... but I just didn't want to cut it, haha.)  And believe it or not the tutorial was originally even longer than it is now, but thankfully I thought back to the most common piece of feedback I received during my last game jam ("improve the pacing") and tightened it up.  I did consider tightening it up even more for the reason you suggest (jammers want to go from game to game quickly), but I also wanted to teach the player how to play (and deliver some adorable exposition, haha), and I just kept drawing blanks on more efficient ways to do so.  (I think my personal goal for my next game jam will be to try to start the player right in the middle of the action without having to read through dialogue, since I don't want to get too dependent on text-heavy games.)

And wow, nice score!  (Better than I ever did while playtesting, if I'm not mistaken!)

Thank you so much!  That's a great score!  :)

Thanks very much!  And that's a good point!  (I was playing around with the colors for the text and the textbox and eventually just decided on those two, but I probably should have tried out a few more!)

Thanks so much!  I'm glad you enjoyed the game, the atmosphere, and the ever-increasing sense of frenzy!

Thanks also for all your detailed feedback!  Those are definitely fair critiques, and ones that I'm not entirely surprised to hear.  As I just mentioned in response to another comment down below, my main goal with this jam was to get the atmosphere right, so I made the music and the art first, but I didn't leave myself quite enough time to actually make the game part of the game.  This meant that I had even less time to test the game part of the game, which led to some pretty severe balance/fairness issues, which you rightly point out.  

I tested the game a little bit before uploading and never got too overwhelmed by the decorations or the ghosts because I never actually went for particularly high scores, but below is a screenshot of me playing it earlier this evening, and I mean... yikes!  You're not kidding when you say it's impossible to get the cookies!  :)

I also thought about switching it from "one press one move" to "hold down to move," but I had already coded it as "one press to move" and didn't have time to test out how things would be different if I changed it.  (Fair to say my overall lesson learned here is even if the main goal is to focus on atmosphere, always leave enough time to design and test the gameplay, haha.)

And those are some impressive high scores!  (Probably better than my scores were when I play-tested before uploading, but not quiiiiite as high as my 555 number in the screenshot below.  ;)  )  Thanks again for playing and for your thoughtful and thorough feedback!  :)

Thank you very much!  Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks so much!  The music was my favorite aspect of this game (and the aspect I created first when I first joined the jam), so I thought it would be fun to play around with it in Godot and see how it sounded at different speeds/pitches.  (Turns out I liked it no matter how much I sped it up or slowed it down!)  And that's definitely a fair point!  I originally had other plans for the wand and for Autumn, but the whole game kinda went through several different iterations in my head over the course of the jam before I finally sat down and started implementing one of them, and by that it was far too late to add several of the features that I had considered.  (My main goal with this jam was to get the atmosphere right, so I made the music and the art first, but I didn't leave myself quite enough time to actually make the game part of the game, which is a lesson learned for next time, haha.)  Thanks again!

Thanks so much!  Yeah, I wanted it to get progressively more hectic as time went on and the screen filled up with decorations... but I may have gone a bit overboard, haha.