Thank you for the in-depth feedback! I think I experienced a bit of developer bias with the difficulty. I can barely beat it now after not playing it for a day.
I had this problem with my first two jams as well, it's quite hard to judge difficulty as the developer, for now my mindset is, "if the difficulty is hard for me, how on earth is the player with no experience supposed to play". Of course if you're having an easy time playing in the moment it can be hard to judge and I haven't figured that one out either.