It can be overwhelming yeh, honestly I probably overshot both the difficulty and progression curve for a game jam, it's quite hard to balance this kind of game without more playtesting and the developer is always going to be the worst playtester because I have more playtime than anyone in the world lol.
There was countless balance tweaks throughout, but I only had 2 playtesters aside from myself, I did have to make things significantly easier after their feedback but probably still not enough sorry about that! I put a lot of work into the run director too :(( beacons are handled differently and it purposely tries to apply more pressure, but with certain limits (specifically it isn't allowed to spawn more than 2 spiky snake enemies, and the chance of them spawning at all is lowered a fair bit) then eases off after completion so you get a bit of a breather.