I would echo a lot of what Olive said, the movement system is interesting but it can get pretty frustrating at times. The constant red flashing is rough on the eyes, especially when concentrating and trying to make delicate movements with the ship, which is a shame because lighting up the level like that is really cool.

I don't understand the intent with the final level. It's a bit too much, and doesn't really work well with the methodical and floaty movement. There's also a really frustrating issue where missiles sometimes just explode and kill you right after firing them because they (I'm guessing) hit the ship's collider when spawning.

It's also worth mentioning in the jam page that the WebGL version doesn't work properly (at least it didn't for me). I was unable to restart after dying, and so had to reload after each death, and couldn't even progress to the next level after completing the first.

Aside from these issues, this is a cool and striking game. It's an interesting way of implementing difficulty by relying primarily on physics and basic movement inputs.

My opinion on the controls and the gameplay broadly flip-flopped between “restrictive, challenging but engaging” to “uncontrollable and emotionally taxing” and drifted toward the latter as the game continued. The first level was quite good in terms of difficulty. The second level I got stuck on for maybe 10 or 15 minutes at least. The ship was so floaty it drove me mad! And it was an unfortunate and cruel bit of design for the tooltip for firing missiles to appear in an area where doing so will immediately kill you. In the third level, the light upgrade was simply too slow and tedious to get that I ended up ignoring it after a few attempts. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to beat the final level other than Leeroy Jenkins-ing directly to the goal. Overall the thing felt like a luck-based affair unless I was making terribly small, slow moves.

The use of lighting and shadow was inspired. I found myself immediately liking the presentation. But the game was also rather stroby in a way I found distracting, especially when making several minor adjustments with the thrusters. The lighting effect itself was rather splotchy and low fidelity, but that only minorly affected readability with this game’s sleek, minimalist aesthetic.

Otherwise, well done on the jam!