This is a fantastic Idea and I absolutely love the atmosphere and art style. The warm lights of your buddys feels super cozy and while I had trouble saving them, I still wanted to just because the world feels so lonely. The audio helps out a lot with that too.
While these things come together very nicely I have some trouble with the game design aspects of it.
Some images here to illustrate things that caused a lot of frustration.
https://ibb.co/5x0RY0V
https://ibb.co/V3tZBc2
https://ibb.co/tbWfK5r
The lights create som banding which become very hard to distinguish from instakill ledges, this combined with that the player sometimes takes a few extra steps to finish the walking animation made me die so many times. I got stuck because I got very careful by the ledges but then turned out there are a lot of slight downhills that are walkable but they really look like killing ledges from the players angle. It took me many attempts to actually get that you can walk straight past the "watch your step" warning, it felt like that warning would teach me where not to go but having died a good 40 times in the game I am still not sure what the level looks like.
I got to the exit alone, and I gave it a good 20 tries to save my buddies but even in my most careful attempts, they kept falling of ledges that I tried to guide them around.
All in all this is a beautiful game with fantastic potential but I feel you need to work on some stuff to either make it less frustrating to die OR decrease complexity of the level OR give the player som better tools to avoid hazards. Thoroughly enjoyed my time in the lonesome scary world you built though, great job!