Thank you very much for the feedback.
I personally am extremely opposed to the idea of having the game outright tell you where to go. I find it kills the appeal of a metroidvania for me and I wouldn't want to implement a feature that I think opposes the point of the genre of my game.
The idea of locking past areas in the beginning is however a design idea I can fully get behind. ( as long as it isn't as overdone as in something like metroid dread ) I already have some changes planned to cut off access to the upper beach area after getting into the shopping district.
Also I find it weird that you say that there are multiple ways you can pick despite the game being kinda linear. (there are some optional abilities and sequence breaks sure, but it is very straight forward otherwise)
But you got a point with the personnel key "ability" . It was mainly meant to act as a bit of setup before getting into the real game, but I probably could have cut it out.
Thank you very much for playing though.