Hey, thanks for playing and all that feedback!! I really appreciate it. If you're interested, here's my responses:
1) Yepp, it is quite lenient all things considered (and in fact, every room is designed to be solvable even if you walk in with 0 keys) but I wanted it to be more "relaxed", so that even players who aren't as much into backtracking would have a chance of finding the artifact even on their first run. I did get the feedback that the game was kinda easy though... maybe I'll do a Hard-Mode-version haha
2) Correct! That's their purpose. I added them at some point realizing that backtracking 4 screens just to not get your keys snatched might be tedious and I hoped that these locks at first seem like pointless decoration until players have an "aha!"-moment, realizing what they can use them for. I'd liked to get more feedback about whether that worked out...
3) Agreed. I'd personally have preferred to have a movement similar to Zelda 1 but somehow didn't get it to work properly. The code now is very basic as I'm an enthusiast at coding at best lol. Maybe I'll figure it out and update it, the movement does kinda break the flow when you wanna breeze through the puzzles.
Again, thank you for taking the time to get into this tiny game as much as you did, This means a lot to me!