I kind of like the premise and the emphasis on exploration, but there are some issues that come with it.
1) While you are encouraged by the game to go around and talk to people, there is no quest log after talking to people, and sometimes no indication as to where things are. Like you wouldn't know you need a shovel for the mountain cave, or that you can't get it from the village. Not saying you should give out full locations but at least keep a log.
2) The game's combat quickly shifts from physical attacks, to magical and all enemies/multihits, to applying poison/stat effects. Compared to some enemies you fight including the final boss, you have to poison & shadow trap him and that deals significantly more damage that anything else. Buffing your attack takes 2 turns and by that time you will deal more damage with poison than with slash the whole battle.
You would have to either buff all other skills (besides maybe healing? but Cunningham is forced to do it most of the time, so...) so they deal sufficient damage, or nerf poison, but probably also nerf some boss health values (1st Unknown encounter, Blue Fungus, probably Death, final Unknown encounter) to correlate to that. And then apply the philosophy further. As of right now, the game is too reliant on status damage for bosses. Enemies are relatively fine to face at the moment.
3) Health potions are severely lacking compared to Cunningham's healing. Outright double their healing. Or make it percentage-based?
4) Doc Falkin's monoliths don't work anywhere except for the forest and abandoned house and I honestly dunno whether you need to activate them all or they just don't work.
5) There isn't much of a background as to where the characters are located or why, unless that is gonna be explained in part two. The whole world is your and Cunningham's house, a village, the forest, and everything else is scattered and only reachable by boat? Why does the village only have 1 boat despite no shortage of wood? Do they live on a very small coalition of islands? Is this a postapocalyptic world and you have to sail or fly really far to reach any towns? The world is very unexplained aside from why the portal exists and why are you going there and I hope at least some explanations are provided.
A lot of the things I said aren't huge gripes and are fixable, and with a bit of polish you have relatively decent combat with exploration incentives. What I hope most is that the world is opened up a bit more since right now it's in an unexplained isolated state of sorts.
If you want further feedback elsewhere I can contact you or you can contact me on the socials I have on my profile but that is up to you, I just don't really like doing a very long itch comment thread.