It's not, (maybe it could be through grinding, but i don't think it's worth it) but you can go straight from the starter area to Santorini and save time for exploring the new area.
A tooltip to let the player know exactly what the upgrades does would be great. For example, no clue what the Danger upgrade does, or the recover upgrade, and some numbers on the health/speed upgrades would be nice. Otherwise this game is fantastic from what i can see.
Agreed. It should probably still exist as an anti-softlock measure, but i personally think it should only happen after like... 100 or so rounds of combat, not the 10 or so it seems like currently. That way the battle of attrition the first character seems built for is actually viable.