Thanks a lot for your detailed feedback!
I noticed this effect with the trail when you die. I tried to disable the trail when you die and then re-enable it when you spawn, but somehow this didn't work. Then I decided not to spend more time on it since time was already running out. I will have a look at this after the rating period again.
For the cursors in the respawn area, someone else came up with a really nice solution that I want to implement. After you die you will be invincible for a short amount of time to get away from all the cursors.
I cheated a bit for the possibility space. There are more than 11 million words you can make with 5 letters. But since you can check each character individually, the maximum number of checks that is really needed is just 5*26 = 130 possibilities. However, 11 million sounds much more interesting than 130. Therefore, the number I put on the UI is the number of words that can be made by the still unchecked characters.
After each dash, you get a new jump. This will help you to reach all places on the screen. For maximal distance:
Jump-jump-dash-jump-dash-jump
But I get this mechanic is not entirely clear, since I did not have time to implement a nice tutorial level.
After a bit of practising with the mechanics, any word can be made within a few minutes. There is a speedrun mode, in which you have to make the word "WOWIE". I was able to do this in 1 minute in just 1 attempt.
This a bit unfair, since I know exactly what I can do. I can imagine that it will already take more time than this to get the hang of the mechanics, without a tutorial. So after the rating period is over I will try to add a tutorial level.
For the cursor color, I had them white first, but I wanted to emphasise more that the cursors are the enemy.
When I made them red is was really ugly, I ended up doing something that was in between ;)