Hahaha, I feel so sorry for you that you have to get through so many deaths. You are like the only other person other than myself that I know of that complete my game. You are like the champ man thanks for finishing the game.
On the pointers you mention honestly there was supposed to be a normal mode and a hard mode so the one you played was the hard mode that why it was a quite the difficulty is amp up a lot.
On the last room, I agree with you there is no clear direction with how to progress in this stage, which is a big problem, I think part of this is that all my friends didn't manage to reach the final stage so when I am balancing the stage there was no complain on the stage therefore the stage is a bit messy and confusing. This is something I may fix in future but regardless thanks for the feedback.
On the shadow figure, it was kind of a last-minute addition to show how the player die for player feedback therefore I didn't make the shadow figure reduce opacity where the player overlaps it. If you realized actually the shadow figure has also a bug where it is move to the player's spawn so that kind of on me my bad.