Great take on Hades and boiling it down the core mechanics and things that made it enjoyable. The key difference there and here I think is that Hades is a full game you're committing to when you purchase, for a jam game, I think more jammers would get a chance to experience the awesome game you made if you cut the difficulty by ... maybe half, at least 1/4. Give us more health to start, or more damage, or reduce enemy damage. Just a slight balance adjustment to get kicking to into things quicker.
But I'm glad I kept rolling through my lives because it's a really enjoyable experience. One oddity on my first run is that my Favor was the same item, if I weren't familiar with the Boon system I probably would have just thought the chest was glitching.
If you did want to keep that initial difficulty curve and you can safely assume a player will die quite a few times on their initial run throughs, then I would suggest chopping up the opening dialogue and doling it out on each restart. The dialogue itself was good, it was just too much at once when I wanted to dive right into the dungeon crawling!
Overall, an awesome jam entry. I enjoyed my time with it. Your team should be proud.