You're right, the closest thing to a failure state is just never being able to reach the victory state, which there is. I thought that this would be a good game jam to experiment with that sort of thing (because of the "let's mess with the concepts of winning and losing" subtheme), but I think my approach was more lazy than it was original. Like you said, there's really nothing stopping the player from intentionally dying until they get to the strongest point and then try to win the game from there, especially because of how hard it would be to win the game the first time around.
Thanks for playing and thanks for your feedback! It means a lot to me :). I loved the voice acting in your game!