This is some great praise! Thank you for the detailed feedback!
When we were brainstorming at the start of the jam we wanted to hit a sorta busy overcooked styled frantic feeling, which it sounds like we managed to do, very happy to hear that :D
For the steering & healing camera interactions I quite like the increased tension with the forced low-visibility camera. If a player is confident they are safe they can bunker down and heal a lot. Otherwise, it's a game of switching in and out of the mode to check for any needed readjustments. If a player had full control over the camera that tension would evaporate.
The ship steering bits are totally fair. We needed to put in some indicator of what heading the ship will end up at. It's doable to pick up a feel for that without one but it's not something that should be expected of players, especially in a jam setting!
The cultist population is a funny topic. We have some rudimentary AI in place so they avoid (mostly) smashing into the rocks while away from the player, but nothing in place to make them aware of other cultists. This leads to a kind of self-regulating population where the more boats are around, the more collisions will occur. We judged it felt good enough for the rapidly approaching deadline, unfortunately how these things go.
We did get into last years video as a bit of b-roll so if we could upgrade to an honourable mention that'd be amazing! The team really put their all into it this year!