Thanks so much for the feedback. And thanks for playing!
Time pressure is something we spent a lot of time go back and forth on. The top left timer is intended just as like a race timer to compare your time to others. Some secret areas actually can shorten levels so they can come in handy there. The flame timer though, which is intended to give an amount of time pressure, actually has no real punishment for failure beyond wasting your time a bit and making the run slower. In our first iteration the flame timeout would end your run in the level and send you back to the beginning. But that felt awful and it punished exploration and it punished getting stuck at a hard section which is just mean. So, idk if you let it happen or not, but if you let it run out, you just have to smash buttons to re-light the flame.