Hi - I think what I ran into was a interface issue. I was clicking on the sword to "activate" it, then hitting up on the arrow keys to walk into the monster, thus cancelling the sword usage (I think). The first time I used only mouse, which is what made the difference. I played (twice) again now using real controls and collected a few trinkets...though apparently there might be more that I'm missing. I tried a run where I kill everything, and another where I mostly avoided monsters...I suppose there might be some other dimension I'm not taking into account. Thanks for responding to my earlier comment!