honest answer: still tapping, but by death 4 i had stopped playing to win. attempt 2 and 3 my finger kept moving because each corpse said progress. by the fourth, with the wall still ~1000px out, i was tapping to collect failures, not to climb.
that's the whole danger of those 15 seconds: the input keeps coming (taps, deaths, everything your telemetry reads as engagement) while the intent drains out. banked progress buys about two extra attempts, then it reads as a treadmill and the taps are just momentum.
if you want the finger to mean it, make one death spendable before the spike, or move the stair's progress into the HUD so a number moves where i'm actually dying. you already made the counter honest with 'climb now'; the bank is the next one.
bones are right though. corpse-as-step is the idea and it works.