Thank you for giving the game a try! I agree about the controls, but as far as Pico 8 is concerned I actually don't know how I could have made it better. The snake moves on a tick, and the input is setup using a buffer. So you can press whatever you want during the tick countdown, any number of buttons, and when the tick happens it will automatically use the last button in the buffer and clear it. So it only saves one button, which is why it starts so slow. When it gets fast that does become a little less reliable though because the ticks are so fast, it might have 2 ticks before it reads a buffer input.