Nice work! Super charming, fun writing. I also don’t think combat was needed, it thankfully wasn’t bad, but mostly avoidable. I think a cool direction would be the NPCs giving hints for puzzles, I already wanted to talk to everyone for the puns alone.
I’m really of two minds regarding buying upgrades. My initial reaction was that I didn’t like it, but after exploring the levels to collect more stuff, and knowing what they were, it was nice to think “I’ll need to dash to get here”. I certainly love the sense of discovery, but it was cool “know the solution” and then “identify the problems”. I can imagine there’s a way to make this setup work.
I’m really impressed by the full integration of the theme. I had some ideas but they a) never came to fruition and b) wouldn’t not have necessarily been identifiable of “ecosystem”. It would have been cool if the zones actually were interconnected (or you started to interconnect them) and you could see things improve.
Not a fan of the key bindings (fortunately controlling the character felt fine). Thankfully I was able to use antimicrox to map everything to a gamepad (additionally combining E and W).
Lastly, loved the intro, I wanted to do something like that but time is my enemy.