Thank you very much for giving my game a go and a rating! Very much appreciated!

Glad I got the atmosphere down, it was probably the strongest point of my game in my own opinion.

It's a little hard to explain how I managed the 2.5D since I'm not great at explaining things, but I'll try my best:

A little bit of rules for yourself:
I suppose more of a general game design thing, it's important to have rules for yourself. For me, I didn't really have too many, especially that I can recall as writing this. One main one I had throughout my mind the entire time was that if something was too laggy for my machine, it wasn't allowed in the final submission. I don't have a particularly great laptop, but this rule allowed pretty much everyone to play my game without experiencing any lag.

Atmosphere & Order:
I started with the 2D bits since I personally find it easier, but from there I could better figure out the proportions and how close to reality everything else would be. I moved on to making level decorations and props, trees, boxes, etc. Afterwards, I focused on level layout and design. If you have an open space level, decorations and decoration density are definitely something to keep in mind. I managed to achieve this fairly well in the first level in my own honest opinion, but not so well in the final level.
Having subtle atmosphere details helps too. Far blur is definitely a big friend, and fog too. Near blur is arguably even more important, but I however couldn't do it in my project as I found it laggy on my computer.

Pains:
A main pain point I had was since the game was 3rd person with fixed camera rotation was that I had to make the player always visible. To do this is as simple as pressing the "Backface Culling" check under the material of the level meshes in Blender. This did not come without a lot of tweaking and remodelling. Godot was not satisfied with just this. Instead, Godot would do completely random things. Turn off the setting and reimport? Not in Godot's book. Godot was just not having it, and neither was I. Eventually, through lots of hacking in the level meshes, I finally got it working. Then, suddenly, out of the absolute middle of nowhere, a challenger approaches! Transparency! Unfortunately, after battling the previous pain for a while, I knew that this time Godot would win, and I was right, so I gave up. Hundreds of tutorials and stackoverflows got me nowhere in that battle. 3D isn't just a whole new dimension, it's a whole new system of rendering.

Vertical Movement:
Honestly, this was not hard, but it of course didn't come without it's fair share of glitches. I have several hacks in this game simply battling for the climbing down part, dozens of raycasts, and hundreds of booleans. Each patched glitch gave me about 2 more glitches to get rid of. Eventually though, battling the terrible code architecture I had and the raycasts' refusal to fire when it's meant to and vice versa, I got it working. Sorta. It's probably the most fragile part of the entire game, and each time I revisited the script that contained it, I was scared. You're not gonna believe this, but I was using a state machine too. Some troubles you just can't escape.

Closure:
Sorry for the novel. I suppose when someone asks you how something is done that you're quite passionate about, you just can't stop rambling. All in all, it's your average game jam game with countless glitches and excessive amounts of ambition. Hope somewhere within the literal 4 paragraphs you found something of use, whatever that may be.

Once again, thank you very much for playing my game, and even more for rating! I really do appreciate it!

Thanks! Super proud of the ambience I set as it matched perfectly what I had in my mind for the first little bit!

Somebody had to introduce you to this one, so I took up the task. ;)

Ah, it was my plan from the very beginning. You can't say it wasn't at least a little spooky, though.

Thanks, I get a lot of comments about the 2.5D effect, it seems many people really like it. I personally love it.

Very nice music credit goes to Kevin Macleod, of course. Proper talented fellow.

Super sorry about no recovery mechanism for the box! Unfortunately I can't exactly upload a fixed version of it now since it's not technically a "Game breaking bug" as it's avoidable, but I would if I could. Once again, super sorry about that!

A thousand thank yous for playing my game and reviewing it! I'll be sure to give your game a look!

Hahah, the ending gets a lot of people! Don't worry, it was my terrible plan from the start.

Glad you appreciated the environment of the first level! I'm aware there's not much to marvel at later on, so I don't blame you for maybe not being as excited about them.

Sorry about the box getting stuck! I was aware about the issue as soon as I implemented it, but I ran short on time and I was feeling real beat towards the end.

Super sorry you weren't as big a fan as the 2.5D feel! It's not for everybody, and I can understand how it can be confusing.

Thanks for checking out my game! I super appreciate the feedback as well!

Super sorry about the box getting stuck, I also wish I could've done more about the text speed, too. There were a lot of things that needed fixing, but unfortunately I ran short on time. Text could've definitely been faster, but I had to make sure that at the very least most people would be able to read it.

I hope you liked the ending, too.

Hahah, sorry about the box. I knew of the issue from the very start, but I ran short on time so I couldn't end up implementing a way to counteract this issue.

Super glad you liked the ending!

Thanks for the input! I was really hoping to add a run at some point but unfortunately making art in such a short time whilst trying to handle everything else is ridiculous. I'm really glad you appreciated the ending, too.