I never played original Tikka either, just saw the video in SGH about it and went with that :)
Controls are straight reimplementation from the Tikka and I agree they are cleverly put together with moving target (can’t get that muscle memory timing to land on wanted number).
Yeah the mutators are a bit hard to keep track of and they are far from balanced but I think they are what gets the “one more try” hooks in. :)