The character movement is very slow.
When the player dies, they want to get to where they were as quicly as possible, but the character just feels slugish and heavy when the player is rushing to get to where they were.
I'd suggest to either make the animation much quickier or make the characte skip to the next spot in the grid automatically when the player presses the move button quickly, like in Tomb Raider Go. In that game, Lara snaps to her next position when the player presses the movement buttons in quick succesion.
Also, I didn't manage to go further than level 3. It can be me being dumb to puzzle games but it just seemed very hard to go through the spikes when the charater is so slow.