Thanks for playing my game and taking the time to write such detailed feedback! I really appreciate it :)
I agree with the points you mention, and for some of them I already have plans to change it. I’ve never been fully happy with the keybinds, and JKL for abilities is an interesting suggestion that I hadn’t considered yet and I think might be better. I’m also considering a different default dash button.
As for the meaningless paths, I wanted to have an aspect of exploration in my game, but I agree that right now this results in too much meaningless walking / backtracking. I plan on making the world a bit more linear in the future to hopefully improve this.
Asset creation is something I definitely need to improve on, quite a few of these sprites I even made in microsoft paint (in the early stages of the game)
Thanks again!