Hey there, thanks for playing! You should be able to control the direction of your dash easily, just by pressing left or right while you dash. There's some internal logic to decide the direction when you're not pressing either to make it easier to use in quick-thinking situations so that might be what you're experiencing.
Regardless, I'm glad you ended up playing it for 45 minutes. This was a jam entry, like most of my games, so they're not meant to have playtimes higher than 5 minutes!