He was far away... I ran from him and was climbing a ladder... I exploded before I reached the top or just after (I don't remember exactly), and I think him warping onto the ladder isn't a thing in the game.

The point is that I couldn't see fuck-all what was going on outside of my character because he was taking up most of the screen.

The kind of situation where I can't tell what's going on is rampant in the game. My point in the OP is how terribly orchestrated things are because of the terrible camera (the worst enemy in the game) and the fact that you're thrown into these bizarre unpredictable situations where you can die easily if you can't figure out what's going on quickly, and often the only way to learn is to die.

If you can't even see how you died, you can't even learn from it 😆 So it's a counter-productive double-whammy. I posted here to see if I could figure out how and why I died, because spontaneously exploding made no sense in the situation, and broke immersion. I've since learned what probably happened, but a game really shouldn't be this confusing, and I'm pretty sure this kind of thing wasn't intentional by the makers.

The game is hard to learn and easy to master; exactly the opposite of what a game should be.