Full results/play links here

Some final thoughts:

On the core gameplay, everything went well. It's a simple idea and I put in just enough, mechanically speaking, to make it go, leaving off the expansion for after the compo. If you play to later levels it becomes obvious how limited the AI really is. I guess some reviewers would want more depth, but I was focused on achieving "beginning, middle, and end" first.

The technical stuff I needed for this game(overlapping smooth movement and tilegrid snake gameplay) was intricate and slowed me down on polish items. I've been gradually working on an update and almost all of the effort so far has gone to reworking the collision/update code so that all the little details are sorted out and it's easier to support more features. This is one area where games that can reuse a generic collision model(which mostly means the usual casual puzzlers and gimmick platformers) will always have a double advantage in ratings: conventional moment-to-moment gameplay is easier to get reference implementation for, and the bulk of the reviewers will be proficient and already basically know what to do and how to play, skipping issues that come up in most real testing and raising their impressions of the game by sheer "comfort zone" factor alone.

And my game is close to but not quite on that plane, since it's built on Snake/Tron style gameplay, but it has a big gimmick that can also be missed - you can play the current game exactly like a traditional Tron type of game without jumping. It needs more than game-jam levels of effort both to understand and to be fully explored. One of the big features my game will get in the update is better tutorialization so that the comfort zone element is improved.

A lot of folks said "it needs a soundtrack", by which I have to assume they mean in-game music, since I put a lot of effort into a title/intro sequence that some of my ~60 reviewers almost certainly just mashed buttons to skip through ASAP. Anyway, I have the start of an in-game tune going now.

PICO-8 was not a significant limiting factor on the coding end of things, and it helped smooth out certain things(color choices, making sound effects, deployment). But people will always complain about low-res pixels once it gets so lo-fi that the fonts are squashed, which is the case with the built-in PICO font. And the small view and scrolling camera isn't appropriate for the size of the playfield, either. So aesthetically speaking it may have been the wrong choice, but for some reason we don't have high-res fantasy consoles. I guess I need to do something about that?