Tried again. First death once again failed to respawn me properly. Also, music decides seemingly randomly whether or not to play.
Really needs a respawn button to fix these issues.
EDIT: I wasn't actually locked this time! My character wasn't appearing at the second cauldron, turns out I'm spawning back at the first despite having saved below. Weird thing, the visuals are stuck to the second cauldron. So even though I respawned at the start of the game, the camera is showing me entirely different rooms than where it put the character.