I'm glad you liked the artstyle, it was indeed inspired by Stardew :)
I agree that the trial and error aspect feels very punishing, it was originally supposed to be different and make the player feel somewhat rewarded when they failed, because each fail was supposed to be a unique outcome. I had to cut that out because of time constraints though, so I just used an explosion as a universal fail instead. Adding hints would make the current gameplay loop a lot more fair, which makes me regret that I haven't added any.
Thanks for the feedback and for playing my game!