Hey, thanks for giving it a play. I am actually very familiar with Pico-8, and know how to use the tracker quite well. I really didn't spend a lot of time working on this, and chose snake as my base game due to time constraint. For a reference of the music I make in Pico-8, check out this project: https://majestikstudios.itch.io/optimization-quest

Thank you for giving the game a try! I agree about the controls, but as far as Pico 8 is concerned I actually don't know how I could have made it better. The snake moves on a tick, and the input is setup using a buffer. So you can press whatever you want during the tick countdown, any number of buttons, and when the tick happens it will automatically use the last button in the buffer and clear it. So it only saves one button, which is why it starts so slow. When it gets fast that does become a little less reliable though because the ticks are so fast, it might have 2 ticks before it reads a buffer input.

Hey, thanks for giving it a play, and for the kind words :)

Thanks for giving it a play! The power available in this game is the Modifiers.

When you are on the main menu, in the top right you will see the points you accumulated over all your plays, this will save to your local Pico-8 memory. Then, if you go to the Modifiers screen, you can spend those points to get benefits that slow down the snake's growth, meaning it has the power to achieve higher scores. These modifier levels also save. Hope that helps :)