That’s quite the demanding frog!
Anyway, while the time you have with jam-games usually is short, it nevertheless felt like an entire journey from being frustrated that nothing you do seems to work (that is to the point you even have to learn the controls) to feeling that you understand at least the basics, to being comfortable with the game-loop. – So while I may have been frustrated in the beginning, once it became clear that the fun of the game is finding out the controls & the ‘rhythm’ of the game, well, let’s just say I’m quite glad I only found out there was a detailed guide here later on.
In a field of games where the polish is on average very high (seriously, I don’t think I’ve played any game this time around that didn’t have some sort of polish – besides my own bare-bones effort that it), this one still manages to stand out.
The music is repetitive, but quite well done, and doesn’t really become grating.
I wonder if there’s some way to keep the ‘find out’ gameplay without the frustration in the beginning – it seemed to take forever to finish the 1st cocktail.
Also, you seem to have given every feature of the Playdate its fair shake (sometimes literally…), most notably the two most underused features, the accelerometer and the mike – and used them in a way that doesn’t really feel tacked on. (While for most of them the action could just have been a button, given the thematics, the feeling would not have been the same.)