I barely grasp what this is, but it fascinates me. It also reminds me of an old DOS game called "Destruction Zone", though I suspect there are actually next to zero actual similarities.
There's the play timer which counts up from 0:00 (and only really makes sense in Timed and Sprint mdoes), but the time bar is the one that ends the game. It's constantly draining and gets refilled when you match things. The rate it drains at increases with each lap.
Great overall package! Solid art/music/gameplay. Puzzle progression feels good so far, even though I've only made it to the second set. The palettes changed more that I was expecting, which was a pleasant surprise. Lots of attention to detail in the manual as well. Well done!
Great work! Excited to see this coming to Kickstarter!
I see you already mention holding left + B to force the greyscale palette to really help the cutscenes shine. Perhaps you could look into tweaking the header to use one of the assigned palettes (probably 0x58 from X (Japan)) to do this automatically in future releases.
There are eight opponents in total. There isn't any way to return to where you were when you died. The game boils down to a race against the gradually increasing speed to see how far you can get before failing a jump. :)
I'm glad you figured it out. It's definitely a little unusual, and I tried to come up with some better ways to introduce concepts, but this is where it ended up in the end.
