Wow thank you so much for this. The article really made my day, thank you so much for taking the time to dig into the game and I'm glad it appealed to you so well. I really liked how you mentioned about the walking backwards thing, I still don't know how else I would discourage it but my general rule nowadays is that if someone doesn't want to engage with a game on its own terms it's their fault if they don't have a good time ':D
Anyway thank you so much for this, it's always nice to be reminded of the high points of some of my older projects.
I spent some time myself trying to think of a solution for people falling into that playstyle, but nothing came to mind. The Watchtower note explicitly warns you the monster gets stronger, so it's not like the game doesn't give an early headsup. Also the game is short and the navigation focus means restarting is pretty painless, you can just beeline through the previous objectives and set your second run up for success. So all in all I came to the same conclusion as you ^_^