Thanks for your honest, constructive feedback and your time! :)
The gameplay is very basic indeed because we wanted to make sure we can finish the game in time. If we had spare time, only then would we have add more features on top of the basics.
The art team did a very good job but as the lead dev I have to confess I personally think I didn't take the best decisions for this particular project.
We knew making a sidescroller with basic game mechanics and turning it into a fun game would be challenging because of the limitations tied to the perspective.
Technically I had to work in my weakest areas like AI (which is not really an AI as you can tell, no decision making) for example.
The technical challenges went wrong and took too long to be implemented. As a result, many things had to be dropped or rushed on my end like the level for example which explains the problem you encountered.
We thought about making a visual novel or a point and click at first and I think that would've been much more doable since making a story is way easier than having strong enough game / level design IMO. I agree this kind of project would've make the artists shine a lot more.
With that being said the game is what it is, it is out there and with more time and work it can be much better for sure! :)