Thanks for the feedback, it's useful -> I can understand not liking that, I have been wrestling with how to mitigate it in the next version (e.g. adding extra lives for solving puzzles along the way). I do think I underestimated how strong loss-aversion is (and I understand it, the player's time is valuable).
The reason it's there is so that people can't just brute-force puzzles - in the next version especially there'll be a big puzzle with 16+ options, and a text tells you how to pick the right one but with infinite lives a player can just try all of them. Also, if someone can work the language out, the knowledge they use to do that is transferrable from one run to another (e.g. once you know you can work out plurals from comparing the word for birds with the word for the (singular) bird in the water on the animals sketchbook page, you can then easily work out plurality on future runs too), and if you know how to get in the bear's cave you can do it immediately on subsequent runs. But I understand that actually taking physical notes is pretty involved and it makes sense people don't want to lose that effort.
Also I do think the version that's up at the moment is just probably too hard, in that the jump from the first puzzle to the second is very steep. So I'm adding something between them to try and smooth that out.
If you play the next version I'd be very interested to hear if you think it's improved or not, but thanks for the comment and I'll keep thinking about this.