As other reviewers pointed out, you take this challenge on your own, but I think it’s nice to not have the temptation. When playing this way you have no choice but to go powerless. Also as someone else pointed out there is a candle in stage 2-3, which is inconsequential as it drops a money bag, but the bone dragons in stage 3-3 drop whip upgrades. Not a big deal as they can be avoided or you can take them and still do a whip only run only as long as you can keep it. This leads to the last problem that breaks the game. Stage 7-1, the library, the staircase room that leads to the armory is curiously empty of the book enemies but worse when you descend the final staircase you simply drop off the screen and die. Until this is fixed this is essentially useless as you would be better off doing a no candle run the old fashioned way. The password to stage 8 will allow you skip past this of course, but you won’t be able to do a full play though.

I am tempted to see if this can be patched along with the Practice hack which allows you to disable deaths from pits and see what happens. I’m guessing the game will just get stuck as it often did there too until the time ran out.