Hi,
Thanks for the playthrough! It was a fun project and I'm glad you found some parts you enjoyed.
A lot of the pieces you mentioned (health drops, spike spawning, and level counter) were points we noticed but ran out of time to fix. Our team was primarily two people, and we're engineering students full-time.
I definitely agree that a cohesive story would add a lot, and we've discussed adding boss floors and actual plot elements --- we actually had some idea of a story, none of which ended up in the game or Itch page in full.
Sorry to hear you didn't get left/right combo pieces, it's all on a random number generator! Making the first few levels deterministic would definitely make that system feel a little nicer.
Once again, thanks for playing and for the feedback! I think we could have gotten away with less polish for more features, but it was a fun experience and we got the opportunity to make a thing.