In either case, it’s still rather annoying. In my current position, I am having to reload at Caverns of Holes, use up 10 minutes to play through Underground Pool (which isn’t hard, just tedious to finish with full health), where there is no save point, and then fail at Darkness Central.
Challenging mode drops to casual mode upon death--is this a bug?
Jetrel
#2
A bug so big we made a front-page post about it and uploaded new builds that fix it.
To fix your situation:
1] download the new build from the same prior post announcing 1.3 (I’ve replaced the old builds with new, fixed ones).
2] press ctrl-d to open the “debug console”.
3] in the debug console, you can type difficulty to get a reading of your current setting. 0 = casual, 1 = challenging
4] in the debug console, you can use set(difficulty,1) to set the difficulty to challenging.
5] if you do try to fix the difficulty, be sure to save after you do - if your last save had it at 0, that’ll persist until you overwrite that save.
Hopefully that fixes your problem; please do tell us how it goes. 
Sorry about that.
rjaguar3
#3
I’m compiling from git right now.
I didn’t get a chance to check the homepage. I’ve actually been save-loading for the challenging run until now (so about a month or so), but I thought that dropping down a difficulty level on death may have been part of the design.
Hopefully “Darkness Central” will be less annoying now!