Heyyy, sorry for the super late reply...and thanks for taking your time, playing and writing all this! <3 It really made me smile as I read it :)
Regarding the 'death screen' bit - what I wanted to achieve with that was letting players know that they're not off the hook, just because they died. I feel like in a majority of games, you either loose all your progress (roguelites, etc.), or too little of the progress. I wanted to make that risk high but erasing all your progress, but still give you a chance to fight against that. Also, I think it complements the whole 'you haven't done enough' idea. So yeah, those 5 seconds of mashing the X weren't supposed to be a nice, calming experience :D Basically, to let you know that if you've lost all your progress, it's all your fault...that kind of thing.
All that said, if I've learned anything from this game jam, it's that I really need to think about if what I think is obvious...is really obvious to anyone but me. Like, I realize there's a lot of things there, that aren't communicated very well...and I think this is one of them.
Now, I wanted to play your game and give you my thoughts on it (since this thread died off a bit), but I can't get it running. :(
Everytime I try, the error pops up saying some dll file is missing. Then it asks me to install some UE4 stuff, but that didn't help either, as it keeps throwing the same error at me, so... :/