Thank you so much for playing the game! I'm glad you tried to experiment with the powerups even though some look kinda menacing because that's the point: trying different things even if they look harmful because "death is only the beginning" (wink, wink hehe).
The thing is that we considered checkpoints because my sister tested the game and she didn't like the fact that you had to restart the game when you died, so we settled in including the "easy mode" so you could retry the levels by themselves but then not counting for the final time score. At the end of the day, we wanted the game to resemble Super Meat Boy but also to have the "roguelike" mechanic of trying to reach the end of the game without dying, so we stuck to that idea even though it could add a little bit of frustration at some points. To compensate, we also tuned the levels so you could find alternate routes if you are more of a patient/explorer type of gamer and also help players that don't like high-reflexes kind of games but also rewarding speedrunners/daredevils type of players that just want to breeze through the levels as fast as possible hehe.