I'm glad you enjoyed the movement! That was the intention, capturing some of that delay a ship would experience. We also wanted to make it somewhat challenging, so that decision supported that.
In terms of level clarity and communication, I agree the game is severely lacking in those regards. I believe some tutorial levels and UI elements scrolling across the screen, describing what the controls do and what different items in the world do, would help a large amount. As far as the cross on the island, that was an incredibly poor artistic decision I made thinking it would be fun. It should have occurred to me that that would mislead.
I liked the high stakes of instant death upon impact, but the game definitely needs to make itself much more clear for that to work.
The illusion of camera movement/scrolling screen and obstacles was pretty much a mimic of old bullet hell games, specifically the fighter pilot variety. The game is supposed to take place just within the screen present, limiting the range the player can navigate to what is immediately visible. There are killboxes just off screen to create a set of constraints
I initially thought about continuing to work on this project and polishing out the details, adding tutorials and in-game information (I guess the write up on the game page didn't do enough), etc, but given the game's ratings I'm not sure if that's a worth while pursuit. Maybe I'll approach it again later, though it might just be a lackluster game concept to begin with.