It has been a joy to see our art get such love here as we felt bea really knocked the iso stuff out of the park (IIRC it was also her first stab at pixel art!)
Sorry that the instructions didn't convey the need for multiple ores better, we considered a more interactive tutorial but .. you know how jams are. And, yea, right now the primary enemy is the clock though that could always change if we continue development. For the jam though our goal was to have it tuned such that it was fairly approachable to get 1 hammer on every level and harder to get 3 just based on time constraints though I expect there was a lot of massaging left to do if we want a good skill curve.
Thanks so much for the feedback -- we'll def fold it into any future work that gets done.