Thank you so much for the extensive feedback! Oh yes, undo for puzzle levels, that's absolutely right. For the normal mode, i'd probably exclude it, or let that be a magus spell so it can't be abused to discover and undo. With the puzzles, i'm thinking more into the direction of setting them up as a separate side challenge, and to have the core game be the freeform levels. Both works, but i feel freeform is where Karawans heart lies. Puzzles were mostly a side effect :D
Better predictability - agreed, a very good idea. I also like to enable stuff like that behind upgrades. So maybe it's a permanent upgrade you get for reaching a unique point of interest, like an abandoned tower, on your trekk across the worlds. A bit of unpredictability in the early stages might still be nice, so you can't fully calculate the risks, but might need to adapt.
I always thought of it as a campaign across worlds (just didn't manage to make another freeform world or meaningfully connect the worlds in the game jam (btw, we didn't touch art, music or sound after the jam). So your roguelite idea sounds great, definitely something to try and test. I'm not sure if i could ever bring the procedural generation to a fun level. It would be great, and i think the mechanics are a great fit for that. We'll see, right now we got all hands busy with developing Dome, from LD48 :)