Thank you for playing and the kind words.
Killing Doug is a sure way to speed run the game. It is coded that you dropped the soul when the player dies but I wanted the jam game to be forgiving so it's commented out till a post jam update happens.
I agree with the background stuff, it was in my backlog to keep the environment simple but add little touches like you mentioned, just ran out of time.
I'll have a look at the spikes hitbox, might be more of a Doug thing rather than a spike thing, Doug has a forgiving hit area which is good but then it can give an odd feeling to when you do get hit vs don't get hit. Something to tweak for sure.