Hi! I'm the person behind the second location and it's gimmicks, thanks for getting throught the whole game! I know not a lot of people finished it so it's quite an achievement I guess. Now onto your concerns with some parts of the game:
- Yep the Patrick level (tysm for reading that dialouge) was a an oversight on my part, the initial idea was to push him all the way to the last "river" and then sacriface him, but You could just skip it like You said, but thanks to You I can now fix it
- The countdown being sometimes to strict and sometimes to lenient was mainly because, the jungle was created when we didn't have the level editor, so it could not be easly tested
- About removing the main countdown for some levels - I don't think it could work really well, the levels were created with a solution in mind, removing the move countdown removes any hardship, as you said, the levels that had a lots of storms could use that, but I think in this case just letting the player having some spare moves would be a better solution, that level was designed to be a labirynth of some sort and often you can be lost in labirynths. After uploading the game, one of the ideas we had for the difficulty was to just introduce stars as a gauge for how well the player got through the level.
- Fun fact, initially I didn't plan to add the storms (which I think are my favourite mechanic in the game), instead I had in my plans to add catapult, (which after some thought was discarded, because of the time limit and because it would be harder to create than the potion which was in itself a lot of pain), so because we needed more than potion and clock for the area, I've decided to add this simple tile which happened to introduce a lot of interesting things to the game - my favourite was the interaction between the ice and red storms. So i think it is funny that sometimes the simplest mechanic are the best ones are the most complex
- The controls we gotta admit - we weren't happy with them but we did not had much time to rewire them in a way that feels natural.
Again, thanks for this loaded feedback, really appreciate it, it was my first time designing levels, and your words made me more confident in my designing skills XD