Thanks for playing and for the kind words! We were definitely going for an old school repeat playthrough to learn the game approach. We figured a smaller amount of content that took a few attempts was a more economical design for a jam. And that extra level of semi-punishing randomness keeping you on edge during combat was our main objective for the player's emotional state. Very glad that it worked for you!
Fairies don't (or at least shouldn't) de-spawn though. They remain even after you heal with them and as far as I'm aware there's nothing in the code that can remove a fairy from a room, so either you backtracked to the wrong place, or you encountered an as-of-yet undiscovered bug (not impossible, we've been relatively bug free so I've been waiting for a big one to appear). Having to choose between luck and HP, and deciding whether to backtrack to one or not was our core idea for them, so if they are de-spawning that's a big problem!