The game has to have some difficulty curve. If the first level starts at the bottom then the player has only a single challenge to worry about, as bad karma at the lowest level means game over (you become so worthless, the universe expunges your soul), but the game should be balanced so that the lowest level is really, really easy so that it is quite unlikely to ever fail, but then the goal becomes not just to win the first level, but instead come to understand the necessity that *what* you do in the first level has massive implications the further up you go. I.e. the difficulty curve should be that the player will inevitably fail on the third or fourth level because of poor choices on the first level, so that they suddenly realise the scope of the game and can focus more on the grand task back on level 1. That I think would be an exciting moment and add a lot of replay value.