First of all, thank you for the thoughtful review! I think you're right on the money about everything that you've mentioned - I was going for a deliberately abstract and obtuse vibe, but I took it a few steps too far. I'm not surprised the rules aren't clear, considering I have to stop and think through them and I made the thing, not very intuitive at all. A result of both poor time management not letting me spend time on making it understandable (something as easy as 'press R to reset' was added on the eleventh hour) and also the fact that the mechanics were meant to be simpler than they ended up, but I painted myself into a corner code-wise (it's nasty) and by the point I realized 'this is unsustainable' it was too late to rip it out, I had to 'massage' the mechanics to fit what the code -could- do without breaking rather than the other way around. Oops!
The 'moving the mouse outside the circle' is more of a surprise, I did have like, 1 person play the game before the deadline and they did struggle with wanting to click outside the circle and having it stop abruptly, I dismissed it as just 'oh just getting used to it'. Probably more of a unnecessary hindrance than I thought! I was definitely too quick to dismiss that issue then
I'm glad the arm was interesting though, it was originally meant to be the main mechanic back when I was still figuring out what on earth I was even going to make. I also knew I wanted a puzzle-y game though, so that didn't really happen. Still kept it though, not like I was going to get a time refund.
Thank you for playing and sharing your thoughts!