UI could be improved a little, maybe add a tiny bit of screen shake for satisfying oomph, that decreases in proportion to how quickly you destroy asteroids (so it doesn't get ridiculous towards endgame, but is still satisfying when you destroy the first two asteroids in the game), etc.
TBH technically it doesn't matter at all, if you already have a base damage that makes their armor irrelevant, so this isn't actually anti-synergy, just found it funny though.
i.e. increasing chance for 10x on first row, then 2nd row, then 3rd row. I already have to manually gamble until it's 10x for first few rows anyways, so that later game is easier. Otherwise game is very painfully slow.
I think one part of it is that it's RNG for multiplier rows.
I personally just kept redoing rows until I had 10x for the first 3 rows, then pushed straight for finishing the square in one go using magic to collect squares.
I wonder if you could have done something interesting with an object that is at fully bright pallete when outside lighting, and darkens under the lantern instead, to emphasize how supernatural it is.
Although, using up an extra row of palette colors just for an ending cutscene or item is probably overkill and also demanding on the constraints you had within the PICO-8.
I just want to say again this is genuinely amazing.
I do wish you put a link on this page, to your articles on Hackernoon, the lighting write-up has been a MASSIVE HELP for me figuring out lighting in a similar way. Again, what you have achieved is just genuinely INSANE.
I really like your approach, specifically including pixels that are only partially opaque/transparent. That usually gets added as an afterthought rather than directly in the first iteration of the lighting system, and I like that. Would you mind sharing a bit more about the coding behind it what you've done?
Unfortunately this is very demanding to run considering the whole 1000 rays per pixel strategy. You'll also notice slightly awkward corner clipping.
I highly suggest you only cast rays to vertices of walls for performance saves (https://ncase.me/sight-and-light/). (note: you will need to make custom code to identify walls/corners from the normal map. You could also brute-force it and treat every single opaque pixel as a square wall with 4 vertices, and then when initially loading the map for the first time, determine which pixels aren't consecutively connected, so you can "delete" redundant pixel corner vertices. There probably is a better solution since your map has a decent amount of surfaces that aren't simply flat rows/columns, but has curves, which won't get removed "properly", but this will still save you from casting a few ten thousand rays.)
Since you are using a pixel-art setup, I highly recommend you check out the palette shading strategies used here: (https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=28785) (you may also want to use the techniques in their part 3 that also makes the lighting "cooler" with flickers/dithering)
