No you were almost certainly playing the game correctly. To be completely honest we kinda missed the difficulty climb. After submitting, it turned out that the game becomes almost impossible at around 1:20. I later went in and seriously lowered the difficulty which made it play much nicer but I guess it's too late for that now.
One thing I would advise though is to play on the downloadable build instead of the WebGl one. It's more up to date and the fluid sim doesn't lag it up as much.
In any case, thank you for your feedback!