Wow, what an incredible game! Absolutely blew me away, just like the darkness got blown away by my drifting backblasts!
I gotta admit, it took me a bit to see just how incredible this game was: not only did I have a weird bug with Chrome where this game was really laggy until I updated, but I also took an embarrassingly long time to figure out the drift mechanic, with me just riding around and trying to dodge as much as I can before that. I know you show the controls at the start, but it was very brief and I didn't quite catch it: maybe it could stand to be re-explained at the start, haha. Now, the game was still really good even before the drift mechanic, what with its really slick and smooth presentation and feel, but it stepped it up to another level once I figured it all out.
The gameplay is just so damn cool, strategic, and intoxicating. I love drifting to light enemies on fire which can create a satisfying chain reaction, I love choosing to commit into a drift to build up enough heat to blast off a whole wave of bats, I love the sounds, I love everything! The fact that drifting being your means of attack means that you need to race towards danger in order to attack is such a clever design: big risk for big stylish rewards! The way the game evolves over time with new enemy types that force you to stay on your toes and use techniques like the backblast, alongside the music slowly getting more epic to match the increase in intensity, augh, I can't even describe it effectively, its just cool, cool, cool, and even though beating it can be a serious time commitment with how far deaths put you back, I couldn't help but want to keep playing more!
If I were to have some complaints, I would say that there is a weird input/control issue that involves drifting when getting hit: for some reason, sometimes the game will ignore my attempts to end the drift, leaving me stuck drifting until I press again and let go a second time. This did occasionally lead to dying and felt incredibly unfair: I'd say it might be intentional, but it didn't happen all of the time, so I think it was just a bug where perhaps the slight freeze where you get hit creates a brief time period where the code ignores input changes. Oh, and I also wish the game had a full screen option, as with how it is now, parts of the screen get cut-off since I can't fit it all in the browser window.