Hi, thanks for the thorough review! Sorry we didn't vote in time for your entry, we missed the fact that this jam was ranked altogether ^_^'
It is indeed possible to rotate a block by carrying it inside the circular areas with arrows outside the field! Maybe they are not super intuitive to discover.
Balancing the smooth movement of the ship and the snappy movement of blocks is very tricky, and we received negative feedback about that interplay even during the falling block jam. We have a new (yet unreleased) prototype now that uses way bigger tiles to mitigate these issues.
Very nice suggestions for the time limit UX, we probably take its design for granted (since we use it in other, more appropriate, minigames in our main game) but your ideas would certainly improve it, both in this specific minigame and in other minigames.
There are currently no multipliers nor balancing about scoring lines vs same color area, nor anything like chains or similar. This leaves the player largely without a clear strategy to score more points, as you experienced. This is something we surely need to address in future iterations.
Thanks again, and see you in the next jam! :D