Nobody has named the most actionable thing in this thread yet, and it is sitting inside nknknk3’s reply 🚀 — “I wasn’t aware that the left and right arrow keys could be used for controls.” That is not a small aside. That is somebody playing your whole game without knowing half the control scheme, and then reporting on how it feels. Worth treating as a bug rather than a note.
There are two candidate causes and they need completely different fixes, so it is worth finding out which one you have.
The first is discovery. Controls written on the itch page below the embed are effectively invisible: people click Play and start pressing things, and almost nobody scrolls down first. If the controls exist only in the page description, the safe assumption is that they were never read. Level 1 is the only place you can reliably teach them, and it teaches best by requiring them rather than describing them — a first level that simply cannot be completed without rotating forces the discovery in about five seconds and costs you no text at all.
The second is the itch embed keyboard trap, which produces this exact symptom, and I would rule it out before redesigning anything. Inside an itch iframe, arrow keys go to the page and scroll it until the canvas actually has focus. So a player can press left and right, watch the page move instead of the lander, and quite reasonably conclude that those keys do nothing. The fix is to focus the canvas on load and again on pointerdown, and to preventDefault the arrow set. It is cheap to test: open your own page, click Play, and press an arrow without clicking on the game area first. If the page scrolls, that is your answer, and it has already cost you at least one tester’s impression.
On whether it is worth expanding, I would read your own thread as “not yet”. Two of the three people who played it mentioned the retry or level-select loop being punishing, and one told you outright that it does not need expanding. More levels multiply a punishing retry loop rather than fixing it. In a precision-physics game the highest-leverage change is almost always making failure cost nothing but time: instant restart on a keypress, no menu round trip, no confirmation dialog, no watching an explosion you have already seen forty times. Get it to the point where a crash makes people say “again” rather than “ugh”, and then the extra levels are worth building, because then each one gets played instead of abandoned.
I should be straight that I am going off your page, this thread and your description rather than a play session, so weight the difficulty read accordingly — the two people above actually flew it and I did not.
One question: when a landing fails, how many inputs does it take to be flying again?