We feel you, we voted for the themes some days before the jam started and we tried imagining some possible games in order to pick what we deemed was the most fun theme to work on, but when "death is only the beginning" got announced we were a bit surprised because it was one one of the themes we had the least initial ideas for, as it mostly made us think of souls-like games. x)
Some solutions also sounded too broken in our minds, allowing for infinite exploit of the game mechanics so we ended up discarding them. Ultimately we arrived to the concept of "cats have 9 lives" and that's how our game came to be haha
Can absolutely relate to the "delirious tiredness" of the last day as well, we pushed very hard to complete the game in time for the deadline because we didn't want to miss it and we ended up getting only 4 hours of sleep after submitting it! WORTH IT!! It will definitely be a special memory for us as well!