Really good game, probably the best I've seen so far, particularly in terms of gameplay & usage of the theme. Using a fixed-width loop as movement has a very unique flavor to it that I haven't seen anywhere else in the jam (or even conceptualized before, really). The difficulty is on-point and the level designs are nicely varied. Took me 32:44.
The movement really is awesome, both the fixed-circle as I mentioned but also the fixed turning direction. It really means you have to learn how to properly orient the circle to go in a specific direction, and it's easy to get tripped up while working through the levels. It just feels good to get better at it.
I do have a couple of gripes.
- The waiting time is too high for me. Part of this is that the death animation is simply too long, but then add on top of that 4 seconds of waiting for most of the levels -- most of them I want to go straight up, and it takes about 4 seconds for the loop to spin around from pointing to the left to pointing straight up. For some levels, like level 6, I spent significantly more time waiting between lives than I did actually playing (I would usually die in ~2 seconds, compared to ~6 seconds of waiting).
- The camera movement screws me up, because it changes where your mouse is pointing. Now, to be fair, that could simply be considered part of the challenge, and if it's a legit part of what you want in the challenge, fair enough. I feel like the camera is too unpredictable, however, especially with how key collection works--it seems like it likes to focus on a key once you collect it? I thought levels 8, 9, and 10 should have no camera movement whatsoever, as they're small enough to fit on screen. (On level 5 this seems especially bad, but on the other hand it kind of encourages you to be more clever about when you start pressing the mouse, so maybe it is a good thing?)
- I think that the orbit animation should not be a circle spawning in and getting larger. This really makes it feel like you should be able to "catch" the thing as your orbit is spawning in, which is not the case. I knew intellectually that I was not able to catch it but I still just kept trying to do it anyways, particularly on level 10. This is of course partially probably just muscle memory from other games with orbit-y things, and so changing the animation might not make a difference, but I would at least give it a try, I think.
- I actually didn't realize the game had music until I started writing this comment... I think this is because the sound effects seemed plenty loud so I didn't bother to turn up the volume. I do think that, once I turn up the volume so that the music is audible, the sound effects are too loud, especially the "disconnect from orbit" sound.
Still, all told, this has to be the best game I've played so far, as it really is quite novel (at least to me) while having enough there to make for a satisfying set of levels. Fantastic job!