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The setting is the whole pitch and you nailed it. The stage is a motherboard seen from above, in pixel art, and you can actually recognise the CPU socket with its pin grid, the vertical RAM slots, the black connectors, the screws. You're playing INSIDE a computer, and anyone who has ever opened a case reads it instantly. "High score chasers, eat your heart out" is a good opening line too.

The menu being integrated into the scenery is elegant, with the title and PLAY drawn onto the chip itself rather than in a floating box. The yellow bolts snaking along the circuits are nicely animated and read well against the grey board. And you save both SCORE and HIGH SCORE, which is the basic thing done right.

Then the problem: I died instantly in both runs, on 0 points, without understanding what happened. The CPU appears on the grid and the end screen is already there. There are no instructions anywhere, so I don't know whether I move with arrows or the mouse, whether I should stand still, dodge or collect. I tried arrows and got some movement, but the bolts caught me immediately.

Two more. Restart only worked on a double click, and the first few times it didn't restart anything, the end screen just sat there frozen with the bolts moving behind it. And because the CPU is a small grey square on a grey board, it's very hard to see where you actually are. A brighter colour or an outline on the player would help a lot.

Two lines of tutorial and a visible player and this goes from unplayable to good, because the concept and the motherboard art are genuinely strong. Also, downloadable indefinitely with the full source is a solid end of life answer.

Thank you so much for taking the time to write such a detailed review — this is genuinely one of the most useful pieces of feedback I've gotten, and I really appreciate it.

I'm glad the menu integration and the circuit board art landed well, that was exactly the vibe I was going for.

On the problems: you're spot on about the missing on-screen instructions and the player being hard to spot against the board — both real issues, and I can see exactly how that adds up to feeling unplayable at first.

As for the restart, that's interesting — I tested it directly on itch.io and didn't run into that issue myself, but the music does occasionally fail to play, so there may be some related timing/loading bug I need to dig into. I'll look into the restart flow specifically to see if there's an edge case I missed.

To keep things fair to other participants, I won't be making changes while the jam is still running, but I'll go through and fix all of these once voting ends — a proper tutorial, a more visible player, and a closer look at the restart/audio behavior are all going in. Thanks again for the thorough breakdown, it's exactly the kind of feedback that makes a project better.