This game was very hard for me. For someone who knew absolutely nothing about match-3 in general I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to get more than I match at a time. I figured it out by watching the vid you posted in another comment, if I was my own it might have taken me a while. The "strategy" I've figured out so far is that to move orbs I mostly spin my selected orb around a square or rectangle so that the orbs I wanna move shift around the perimeter around like on a conveyor belt until they move over. I also realized that by using diagonal swaps you can do things a lot faster than that, but (playing with a mouse) it wasn't easy to get diagonal swaps consistently, and it made things more difficult to visualize in advance, so I didn't do it much, except in "tangled" mode against the lizard.
Tangled mode was actually even harder for me, even if I had time to think and plan ahead, which makes me think I'm probably still missing some basic strategy.
Anyway using this information in normal timed mode I managed to beat 3 stages for 3 or 4 times but never managed to beat 4.
Most of the time, I wouldn't pay too much attention to which orbs I was popping because popping a decent number was already kind of a challenge so I had to go for the low hanging fruits anyway.
From my point of view, the (?) stages were counterproductive, because it'd make me go against a more difficult enemy sooner. But I guess this doesn't matter to someone skilled enough to beat all the stages.
In terms of visual communication, the fact that only the enemy HP has a bar and the rest is just numbers meant that it'd feel pretty underwhelming whenever I was doing anything other than raw damage, especially because I was mostly focused on actually learning to get matches and not paying too much attention on the stats part.
Overall the difficulty curve was absolutely brutal, I had to learn how basic match-3 works, how to move orbs around the map efficiently, all while being on the timer, and how the turn-based battle system worked at the same time. Infinite mode (and tangled mode) helped me a lot to figure out the basics, but the skills weren't exactly 100% transferable as timed mode kinda required me to come up with new strats to actually get things done in time. Also in general nobody expects to find the tutorial as a special seed. If you want this game to be accessible to normies you'll need to have a way clearer and slower tutorial mode that goes through all these things slowly and one by one, and to have it clearly labeled as a tutorial within the game.
Another thing, I won't pretend I know anything about this, but does *anyone* do this kind of high-speed match-3 gameplay where you're supposed to rearrange many pieces before they combine? From what I knew about match-3 in most cases it's way more casual and you do just a couple swaps then just let it fall.
I will say though, art and visual style, music, UI design, and everything else is amazing. As I said a million times before I had no clue about match-3 games and no real interest in figuring them out, if this game managed to keep me interested it's because of that too.
I'm sorry, this is a very long post and I think I've repeated a lot of stuff in more than one place, but I hope it's helpful somehow. Good luck with the game, I hope to see it again next time.