Yep it was on purpose! I was very concerned about the difficulty curve, so I figured I'd make it so that anyone who wanted too could use continues and you'd get an advantage from it. But if you wanted to try and do it with no continues you could! Honestly don't even know if it's possible to do it without continues, difficulty curve and all that.
I'm glad you liked the story! I honestly spent way too long thinking of how to make a tower defense game make sense, like I was even thinking of writing journals you could access from the point of the view from the villain's, but that seemed over kill for a jam.