Yeah, I wish I had prioritized communicating a lot more information than I ended up with. Like I think not having killable enemies on the first level is good in theory for getting the player used to the gimmick and having low initial tension, but I 100% agree with you that it's just plain confusing and worse off for doing that while not communicating any of those intentions clearly enough. And yeah I probably gotta agree with you on the second point too. Of course the intention was to give a second of downtime for the player to process what just happened when they die, but if the way it's implimented is that confusing then it would probably be better to just have the player be functionally stationary for a second with a respawning animation or something.
Thanks for your words, I always love well reasoned criticism!