This reminds me quite a bit of the awesome Kuru Kuru Kururin game:
- the player piece isn’t a stick, but only two dots, one at each end of an imaginary stick.
- there is no way to move the stick. Instead, the player controls its rotation, and the ‘enemy’ pieces approach it.
That simplifies the controls to two fingers: one to rotate the stick one way, and one to rotate it the other way.
This game also gets rid of most of the graphics; enemies are simple white rectangles on an almost black background, making the playing field look highly abstract (except for the paint splats left behind when one hits an enemy)
After the first couple levels I was thinking "oh god I will never be able to do this" but now I've cleared the "anger" stage and have started to develop strategies to approach several different situations. Pleasant feeling.