Thanks for playing! It's unfortunate that the difficulty was off-putting and led to a bad experience, the various mechanics of my games can be obtuse for players at times. This was my first major project and I think I've gotten a bit better at making things more accessible since. The hidden text was probably not the best decision, I haven't brought it back in any of my other works.
If you want to try the game with a bit of a power boost, you can modify your save file to get more stars, it's located in C:\Users\*USERNAME*\AppData\LocalLow\Impy\Sweeper. Set all map awards to "true" in the awards.sav file to get more starting options. It's always disheartening to hear from players who are enjoying the premise of one of my projects but find some aspects of the gameplay troublesome, I'm sorry about that.