As a huge Mr. Driller fan, who has cleared the arcade game several times without dying, I really want to like this, it's a cute tribute and art style, and a lot of the gameplay is very faithful to the original. I'm not familiar with all the limitations of Pico 8, but about 3 major things here keep me from fully enjoying this and end up frustrating me.
Mr Driller isn't as nimble, half the time when I want to jump up a block he just refuses to do it, and of those half times I end up getting squashed. It forces me to play way more reservedly which doesn't bode well with the timer, and how painfully slow the air capsules want to fall down. Sometimes he doesn't want to drill to the left or right; maybe I'm not close enough, but it feels like it should have a more forgiving range because again, any error tends to cause me to die when I know exactly what I want to do but it seems to ignore my input.
I know there's only so much screen space, and the scrolling works fine when going down, but if my vertical descent stops it really ought to scroll UP... not down. A lot of times I'll be trying to make my way towards an air capsule and be crushed by a forgotten colored block that I couldn't react to because I have all of two blocks of vision above me.
Third, the game seems to bug out randomly, and worse yet, when I'm really close to the end. What happens is it looks like the background disappears, and the game crawls to like 2 FPS or something, becoming virtually unplayable.
The closest I can get is 4830ft, and I played as much trying to get to 5000 feet. I wish these issues were kinda ironed out cause there's a lot of potential here, but it's not quite hitting the same fairness as the original.