That sounds awesome! Love it! That description almost sounds like Hyper Light Drifter's kind of post apocalyptic world and how it tells the story through the environment and enemies, super cool. I honestly believe that you've got a gem on your hands. I'm very excited to see where you take this

I totally get how just talking to someone can really help solidify ideas. When I'm working on design stuff, I can sometimes get what is essentially designer's block, but that usually can be fixed by just bouncing ideas off my friends

I've got a new request: can we see some visual feedback that we got the key? Like if I press select, maybe a key icon could show up in the bottom left? Because I feel like it wouldn't hurt to remind players that they already got it or to tell them that they forgot it if the icon doesn't show up

Yeah, although it's been relatively low-priority, I do want to add a key indicator to the UI. I'll probably roll it into a general purpose system for level-specific indicators. So, it will take a bit longer to implement than simply adding an indicator for just the key, but it could then be used for any arbitrary level indicator or counter.