Hey! There's a tutorial infographic included in both the main menu (the ? button) and the screenshots of the jam page that explains things =)
Apologies about there being no quit button, it completely escaped my mind at the end there!
oh, i see it! sorry, didn't try hard enough to find it haha
Now that I've played it, my critique is similar to what I was thinking even before I realised the goal - the results for the item combinations don't seem to be very intuitive. Colors, faces and type of object all seem to be decided randomly when combining and because of that layer of abstraction between ingredients and result it doesn't feel fair when I create something the spirits don't like - since there's no obvious way to know what you're making until you make it.
If this is meant to be a trial-and-error experience it's successful, but even in that case the solutions would seem to be brute forcing your way through combinations until you lucked out and found the one for the item the spirits wanted.
Basically, without a clear idea of what combinations might make there's no choice involved in the experience and you're at the mercy of the draw. The idea of goal-oriented item combining however is a good one and the setting of ghosts desiring results is nice! I like the levels having different things going on in the background, it made each one feel purposefully different despite the same gameplay between them.