Thanks for the feedback! The ability to directly retry a level is an interesting idea -- though as a survive-as-long-as-possible game with randomly generated levels, it wouldn't fit very neatly into the design unless there was a lives system or similar. Perhaps it could fit in some kind of separate practice mode, though that would probably be out of scope for the immediate post-voting patch. (Or maybe a separate, more distinctly puzzle-ish game altogether with curated levels and special mechanics.)
Still, the core issue that there's way too much downtime between failure and getting back to interesting gameplay has been pointed out by several people already, so that's a big takeaway for me.
The fundamental idea I started off with was spatial looping of some kind, which then gained inspiration from repeats in sheet music, loops in programming, and this game I remembered playing a long time ago to turn into its final form. Glad to see people liking the concept! Also happy to be repping Rust in this jam. :)