i could totally see that happening, I often wonder about how to balance that line of like, what does the player need to know and what will some think is too much information. I think I got lucky with this project since it's essentially a puzzle variant on an arcadey maze game.
Each concept I introduce has an extremely simple first level for its introduction. One thing that I think helped me was adding interstitial scenes with just a paragraph of text, between each level with that introduces the new concept, in a hopefully subtle and humorous way, which a few of my playtesters responded to well.
If I had something more complex going on I could see it being troublesome though.
Additionally your concept sounds very cool, and I look forward to giving it a shot, hopefully tonight, once I polish one tiny little thing in my game and officially submit it.