I appreciate that you take criticism in stride, as a dev that’s one of the best skills to have. I’ll give the game another shot, using the replay feature to keep it going. I totally missed that the first time. I blame itch partially for not showing the description of games in any capacity on the jam page and allowing a direct download.
I somewhat agree with your opinion on who’s fault player confusion is generally, but I think there is a certain slack we need to give ourselves in the context of a game jam. Getting a working product up onto itch in time is hard enough, so including a tutorial, or making the controls 100% self explanatory is something we just can’t expect to be in-scope every time. Especially when some non-jam titles are guilty of that. I hope we cross paths again in a future jam, or if you make a full version of this game :)