I'm glad you enjoyed the strangeness! The softlocks are a real problem in this version. If I continue working on it I'll have to spend a bunch of time figuring out how to design them away. The wide potion section is about where I started to seriously run out of time so it's particularly touchy.
The cards are in there because I panicked at the last minute about having some motivation for the player. So I added a generic collectable. In retrospect it was a mistake, I should have just focused on making the level explorable and let the lack of motivation be a post-jam issue.