This is incredibly cool, and my only point of contention is:ESDF and not WASD??? I'm assuming that that's due to some limitation of PICO-8 and not because you're a particularly depraved individual, but it rustles my jimmies all the same 😨
It is - they're the default PICO-8 "player two" control keys, which meant it was cheaper to implement while trying to fit everything else in.
I'm only moderately depraved.
this also makes it indirectly compatible with AZERTY keyboards