hey! to address your points:

 -  a lot of this is about the flame jump. yeah, we sorta got that the flame jump was bad after testing levels later on; it was a bit too deep into the jam to tweak the metrics and rebuild like 9 levels but we're going to go back and make it more fun to use

 - each respawn takes around 3 seconds. we could probably easily shorten that to 2 if we spawn the player closer to the left edge of the camera and quicken the screen transitions just a little bit

 - i'll try simplifying the character sprite a bit

 - the idea behind having a lot of levels in the beginning is to get players used to having to coordinate between a light stage and a dark stage before throwing in the crazy elemental stuff. i was even thinking of adding more elemental levels to the end but that would worsen the dragging on problem :/ i'll look into it if more people complain about the same thing