Thanks for playing!
Jump forward + move forward are indeed the core moves required to progress, the other moves offer additional and often easier alternatives. The game wouldn't be more streamlined with just those movements as then it would not be possible to lose any movements, it's the issue you'll see with other 'moves = lives' jam submissions - as soon as you lose a single core movement it's game over. I've designed mine so the extra moves make the game easier but are not required to progress, and you lose them in an order that does not fully impede you of making progress until you actually reach a game over state.

I'm not sure how the loss of control would be unclear depending on how invested you were in the game, it's represented in multiple ways:

• You literally lose your moves/commands whenever you take damage
• When the clock completes a turn, your reactions get slower - your inputs are queued +1 turn later, which is reset by taking damage
• For every damage you take, the clock timer gets shorter, inevitably spiraling your loss of control
• All movement happens on a set, universal timer - you do not fully control the time of your actions & reactions
• Once a movement key is pressed, you cannot willingly take it back or change your input, only taking damage will stop queued moves
• Thematically, the game is built around the concept of human aging & a slow process of death by loss of one's own functions/control of self
• The gameplay loop is designed in such a way that the end is inevitable, you cannot avoid losing yourself and dying, you can fight harder against it but your own death is beyond your control

If none of these aspects were apparent to you, please do share what you took/understood from the game and its workings as I haven't seen anyone mention not finding any "loss of control" in the game so far and it would be interesting to understand what you interpreted. Cheers!

Even with the parts I didn't manage to implement, the death spiral was always the intended end.

The only part it's missing that I'd planned for was being able to reach your sister's grave if you get past all the challenges - this would then put you back at the start, but without recovering any moves or time. The idea was that you're visiting your dead sister once per year, and it's the same journey - but each time it gets harder and harder. When I didn't manage to make the cemetery screen + restart in time, I just shoved 5 extremely hard and maybe not passable challenges at the end.

The awkward staring at the motionless character is intended... but maybe should be shorter - you're watching her last moments before death, and then the game closes. It's certainly meant to be uncomfortable.

And yeah, after the first comments came back - it became very clear that the indirect tutorialization was not even close to being enough... which is sad as I still had enough time to fix that before submitting, had I playtested a little bit.