It didn't occur to us until reading the comments that it wasn't intuitive if Head Bonks were a good thing or a bad thing 😅
Originally in the main mode, you'd lose outright if you ever bonked X amount of times, which made it clear you should avoid that but it ended up being frustrating to have to replay the entire game for making mistakes, especially considering how chaotic and hard it is to control the character towards the end.
So we removed the lives system and just made it count how many bonks you accrued. It's occurring to us now that the goal of arcade-y games is to typically make a number go up, so that being a number that goes up intuitively seems like it means you should shoot for more head bonks, haha. Maybe a funny thing we could have done was name it "Head Integrity" or something, and it starts at 3 and subtracts 1 on every head hit, but then keeps going past 0 into the negatives.
Anyway thanks for the feedback :) big lesson learned about being more thoughtful with making the player's goal intuitive!