Thank you so much for the kind words :)
You've definitely identified some of the issues that came up during play testing. The shrines indeed come alive and never flip back which is one of the many problems - also it should have been clearer that it's 1 shrine per clearing max, my bad. And yes play-testing did reveal that playing this was too boring unfortunately.
The whole process was fascinating, in hindsight I wish I'd done things very differently and instead started with play-testing immediately, before committing to something. Now I'm working on version 3 which fixes many issues but is also different in some ways, I'll post on the discord once I feel I'm close to something more balanced and playable. Which won't be very long now I, fingers crossed :)