Thanks for the detailed write-up! Reading through the comments, I've come around to thinking the game should have been more forgiving. I only finished the level design on the very last day, so checkpoints didn't cross my mind. I thought resetting the level added tension to handling the bombs, but making you wait 6 seconds every single time and redo the whole level was clearly a bad call.
Originally I was planning a complicated finale that mixed all the elements together for the last puzzle. I realized it wasn't going to work, so I switched to what's there now, which asks for timing and execution instead. Some of the puzzles are still hard, though. Maybe I should have looked into an easier way to control throw strength, an arrow indicator or something like that. (With its own trade-offs, of course.)
Not putting a timer on the grenades was the core idea from the start. I was trying to recreate what I remember from throwing practice grenades myself. Hiding the fuse time gives the explosion a particular kind of tension. But counting seconds with no cue at all is genuinely hard, which is why I added the clock later on.
This is the first time I've ever gotten a review this long. Thank you for putting so much time into it!