Thanks for the high praise and feedback!
1. Good point! That'd be pretty easy to toy with. I'll see what I can do on this.
2. This was sort of an experiment I was trying to get players to use the sword "bounce" to jump up to the platform above by hitting the snake on the pillar. I'll have to test things out a bit more in the future to see if I want to keep going for precision platforming, or not. It seems with the game's current speed that may not be a wise direction.
3. In the future I'd like to add in a more proper "death" screen that shows what hit the player and everything very clearly. I was a bit pressed for time, so I decided to just ignore that aspect for now. That said, I maaaay end up making the player's hitbox a bit smaller to make it a bit more forgiving.
4. This was totally on my to-do list, and I absolutely agree! I'll see about getting that in for the next iteration. :)