Wow thank you for such positive feedback!
I really had the old Spectrum/C64/DOS games I grew up on in my head, so just aimed for things that made me feel happy. I was really just cherrypicking things from a general time in my life rather than any platform in particular, so i'm glad you thought it felt coherent.
You're right, it was somewhat procedurally generated, in that it loads chunks of levels in at random as you progress, but I only had time to make two chunks. And I definitely felt the comparison between our games in that the bad guys really didn't stand a chance against being squashed!
Thanks for playing, I'm glad you had fun