We added last minute a lower spawn rate in the first 10 seconds of the game to smooth out the experience to the player (so they could understand what's going on before getting overwhelmed with thoughts), but we definitely should have also steeped up the difficulty in the latter half of the game to make it more challenging. After you make sense of the gameplay in these 10s, the difficulty does not progress at all. Lesson learned!
Thanks IffiDev for the feedback!