Hello, saw your post so here my honest review :
The game is really beautiful, I liked the design choice to have "frame-locked" animations, it work well and give it a really cool identity.
For the balancing, the exploration part look fairly balanced, It took me some times to find the good path but not too much, and exploring when the game look good is cool.
For the fighting part... I don't know if I misunderstood something but the game is hard as hell, like a simple rat can poison me and kick me half of my life like this, but we have a lot of healing so its ok, but when a skeleton OS me ? In my third run I think I managed to survive to on of their hit, maybe that's because I had the second armor (ratslayer was its name ?). To be honest, I don't know if its intended or a bug, but you can spam attack when its your turn, so it made the whole game playable for me, killing every ennemie on my first turn. But for the last boss, even with this trick, I did not manage to OS it and don't worry for him, he did it ahahah. As I said, maybe there is a mechanic I'm missing and if you point it to me I would be happy to retry.
For the rest, there was some bug in addition to the one I mentioned before , like sometimes, a skeleton start a fight with me then disappear, leaving the fighting UI forever, or once I took a chandelier after already having one on me and it sent me flying out of bound on top of the map (it was pretty funny too) but I know it's a game jam and I wont take this in consideration for my notation anyway, just for you to know.
The UI is simple but work (even if you could make it a bit noisier to match better with the look of your world), I think you could add some stats and/or a description on the different items. Also, when you focus the UI and press TAB, it won't close it but switch between different type, which is annoying..
The sounds are great, I was just missing the feet on the ground sound which could be a great addition to the already cool ambience.
Overall it was a great game, very nice job to all of you !