I'm playing on casual. This was cute and the writing and dialogue was charming and made me want to explore more, but I couldn't find the wand in one orbit of the island, so I quit. I tried looking down every route I could find, but I couldn't find it and didn't want to think harder after work. I wanted to see more but just got bored too quickly. The rewards from the mailboxes were a nice reward to lost wandering to make it less tedious, but maybe consider some dialogue based hints on the wand location for those of us who like bumbling through games while watching TV? Maybe the snake could have been like "If you need to find more gems might I recommend looking in the northwest forest for a wand? I smelled one around there a little while ago." or some shit, I don't know.
Yeah, I gotta agree with you! I'm working on a patch atm that makes some adjustments for ease of getting started as there's been some similar feedback. There's going to be some more direction towards the wand and a couple "must have wand" barriers to make sure you can't wander too far past it. Thanks for your feedback!