I ran through the trials quite nonchalantly despite the timer; perhaps it was a mixture of the ability to stop it indefinitely and the effective yet deleterious sound design that led to me playing it so luxuriously, although it also has enough going for it that a repeat visit is an intriguing proposition. The later levels provide an engaging finale at any speed, yet for as minimal as it was, the micro-narrative in the help info felt left behind or truncated without as much as an Aperturian goodbye.
The game is a Nerve proposition as old as time: maneuver a maze of platforms and obstacles with a timer stuck to your back. It's so ubiquitous it had to have been one of the earliest games ever invented. Pausing time, however, is different from pausing a timer, and I think the conflation of those two things needs reconciliation, because if your intention was to implicitly allow the player to not care about the timer, then the design of levels and the pace of the game could have executed on that rather than entirely retaining the tone of a "Time Trial."
Something about the mechanical feel, specifically the discs, feels reminiscent of wonky free-form solutions in immersive sim games like Deus Ex, while also perfunctorily keeping up with Portal-esque tonal traditions; I think either lane can work for this vehicle, but picking one will save you the effort of trying to design both a story and a system all by yourself.