one way to avoid getting lost is keeping track of your tracks on the dirt. you can at least use that to avoid repeating areas (time) or to make sure you hit every area (kill%).
i don't want to spoil anything but if you're wondering what happens to the boy, play "Skinny" by the creator (Thomas Brush). the 3rd secret item in that game tells you what happened to pete.
i think penalizing for replaying a level AND penalizing upgrade cost recovery AND penalizing for each temple AND increasing the costs of upgrades as you level up is causing the difficulty of the game to increase exponentially. maybe take one or two of those aspects out, no game has all four of these in place.
 "Mechanical Commando"){kind=icon}
 "Coma"){kind=icon}
 "Robot Legions"){kind=icon}
 "Shadow Snake 3"){kind=icon}
 "Gorillas.bas"){kind=icon}
 "Platform Racing 2"){kind=icon}