If I had a nickel for every game in this jam where I had to fight a chochin-obake, I’d have 2 nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
There’s potential here for sure! I see you’ve already done a lot of self-reflection about things you could’ve done better, and your thoughts actually align with mine pretty well. It’s good to think about what kind of game you want this to be, if you do want to keep working on it.
One thing I noticed at some point in the game, was that there’s very little point to actually fighting enemies. They are quite slow, and the rooms are huge, so it’s easy to run past them, and there’s no reward for fighting them. It might be good to have HP drop from enemies (and at save points?) instead of regenerating, or maybe just having some locked arena rooms to force the player to engage with them. I also got lost a bit at the start, as I mentioned in the Discord, because there’s quite a few immediately interesting places (the rocks, the cave, the spider web, the path back) put onto the player’s mental stack before you get to interact with them, making the only actual intended progress path (the well) easy to miss.
Very stylish and cohesive game for sure though, could be something special with more polish and content!