I like the idea and presentation a lot but wish it had more juice.
Visual presentation is very clean. Strong color palette and consistent artstyle. Really like the reflection on the timer too + I appreciate you even had a start screen
Initially it's interesting to toy with and panic, die rinse repeat, then you figure out which numbers you need to wait for and which are irrelevant/wait times. I do like that it speeds up if you stand in the ":" but didn't figure it out on first play until reading the description and trying again.
I like that the idea is epurated and novel, polished rather than throwing extra unneeded mechanics in.
Wishlist/Random improvement ideas as tribute:
- You have a strong art style for vector graphics and an eye for color. Add some motions to your assets that respond to player input imho and you'll go far. Basically even without doing frame by frame animation, stretching and squashing sprites goes a long way for juicing up visual effects or character motions, especially the dash. You can achieve that by tilting or stretching sprites etc.
- For this jam it works but in the future strongly recommend adding half randomized pitch or duration to sound effects to limit fatigue of hearing the same sound effect frequently.
- I don't think you need a lives system here, being able to manually quick reset would be more fun.
- Initially dashed across the gap between the two digits set and thought I was to hold on to dear life by holding towards the wall until the digits rolled. This caused it to have no time acceleration so I'd have to wait a few minutes and gave up until trying a second time after reading the description.
- Loved the splash art but thought it said Inside Tide. Adding an indent would clear up the confusion without damaging your good graphic design too much