Thanks for playing, I'm glad you had some fun with it!
Did I leave the arrow in the knee line in the game?
What you say to the guards doesn't matter, you don't get any help in that level. You were supposed to, that was the idea, but I never actually implemented allies. The key to not dying is to keep moving; melee enemies are much slower than you and ranged enemies basically can't hit moving targets. I wanted to put a continue button on the game over screen but never got around to it, though you can reload an autosave from the main menu (unless you're on the bugged Linux or Mac build where saves don't work).