Thank you for the extensive review :D
Agreed on the dialogue UI being very basic. Good point about the next lines being instantly visible, though. I didn't want to force the player to wait for dialogue to finish but I'll need to come up with something better in the future.
Glad to hear that you got used to the movement! I wasn't sure if completely fluid continuous movement would make it feel even less dungeon crawlery, so I opted for the brief delay just to be safe. As for the crossbow, you have to manually reload it every time (and the gun after 6 shots), but in hindsight I should have added UI hints and other feedback like a sound cue to make that clear.
Agreed about the same-ness of the levels. I've got tile and room variety built into my game system, but I went overboard with the basic textures of the current theme before learning there's a 200MB limit for webGL files within a zip file published to itch, so I already had to remove a bunch and downscale the remaining ones just to stay underneath that limit. It's definitely a lesson learned for next time! I should just finally embrace pixel art :')
I was hoping that the current variety of enemies was interesting enough that I didn't need bossfights, as some of them were already quite tough and tricky (and a pain to develop :D ) so I kept that as-is. I do like the idea of more variations in loot and stuff like that, would indeed make things a lot more interesting. Right now, every level has the same amount of random rooms and the same loot and levers, with only the layout and the monster spawns being truly different. I did that to make the expectations for the player more consistent, but agreed that it suffers from a severe lack of variety.
Regarding the map, my reasoning was that if the map also shows the corridors you've been in, it would be harder to determine if a room had been fully visited yet, or if there were other corridors still left unexplored. I thought just showing the rooms would be helpful enough. I do very much like the idea of using a two-color system, that's a brilliant solution :D
Every level has 2 levers, which each open one of the gates at the end room (unless the gates overlap, then you need to pull both). I intentionally try to have them placed in rooms that are relatively far from the end, and if possible far from the beginning as well, to force the player to explore a little more. Because in theory, once you pull a lever, you can reach the exit through one of the gates. I wanted the player to travel through a few more rooms with enemies before that happens, to force a bit more exploration. If you immediately find the exit, you can't get there yet until you've explored further and found a lever. At least, that was the idea.
Also, amazing video, well played and it was fun to see you get pretty far :D