Thanks for playing! I'm glad you felt progression was nice and that I have a good base to build from! I'm glad the world felt immersive, I was pretty proud of the water animations so I'm happy you picked up on that! Thanks as well for your comments on the art style, I tried this art style for my first ever game jam and it totally flopped but I figured I'd try it again and this time I actually had great success!
On the itch.io page I probably should have wrote this a while ago, but you are correct in how the theme is used!
Erosion was used as the main motive for why the eye-people have to get new suits. The diminishment of the suits can act as a diminishment of the body and of material. Without the bodies eroding, Eileen wouldn't need Ryan to go down and get the new suit ready, and Ryan wouldn't need to go out into the sewers. This materialistic way of treating humans led into my diversifiers.
I chose two diversifiers: treasure hunting and digging deep. Treasure hunting is used through the objective, the treasures are suits. The importance of them are stated in scene 1. While they are not typical treasures like gold or silver, to the eye-people they might as well be. In scene 3 Ryan goes hunting for a new suit, he doesn't know if it's a guaranteed thing so he has to search and explore the sewers leading into the second diversifier. Digging deep is used in the sense of going deep into the sewers to find a body, even though there's no dirt to dig it's still technically going deeper underground to get something.
The combat was pretty unresponsive, I plan on fixing that soon after the jam ends so it feels better. I plan on having particles on the walking corpses when hit and a proper sound for the axe when it connects with things. Doors are unnecessarily complex but I wanted to try something new and cool, they just need a bit more tweaking to feel good.