First, I want to say thank you for playing! And thank you for the in-depth review, I appreciate people like you that help me improve my craft.
I agree with most of what you're saying, and I feel the games level design was its weakest point, and is what resulted in a lot of difficulty. To be honest I'm not a great level designer but working on getting better! I wanted to make some larger levels more focused on speed and movement and less focused on combat, but I just lacked the time unfortunately,
I had a few testers test for me and most of them did tell me it was a bit of a difficulty curve, but I was also told not to change it as they liked the challenge in such a short game. Though in hindsight I should've implemented some difficulty settings to please all types of players, especially in a game jam like you said.
I'll continue to get better and learn from this project, it was really fun making it! Thanks again for playing and leaving such a helpful comment!