The idea of an indicator when in range of a well was proposed by a good friend of mine (I let him know of your praise for it :D), and I'm really glad I took his advice! The well sounds were something I wanted from the beginning, but were actually implemented towards the very end. I really felt it pulled things together. Looking at the other wells while chanting is definitely an important strategy to beating the game. The wells all have the same behavior, but all have modified random numbers to determine when they escalate to a new haunt level. I'm really happy you enjoyed and noticed those last minute improvements!
Yeah, I can definitely agree with you that the game needed more things to do besides tending the wells, it's one of the reasons why I kept the game intentionally very short. It's no longer than 6 minutes to beat, but I think it feels longer due to the repetition and having to maintain focus constantly. I had other ideas such as: lighting and delivering incense, chanting at the gong to reduce it's cool down, and performing a mini game if the ghost girl grabbed you, temporarily disabling you until you completed the mini game. I had a completely different map for a while, with a single well and a place to gather incense, but I just didn't have the time to experiment with those features due to the constraints of the jam and being incredibly new to this style of game. The boiling kettle analogy is perfect, it's also pretty much applies to all the "FNAF" type games...which I sometimes refer to as "Horror Management". You have to keep doing Y to "win", but X and Z are doing their best to stop you. I probably over simplified due to my fear of over scoping and doubting my abilities to get anything more complicated out in a playable state within the time limit.
RNG is definitely a factor in this game at times. I spent a very good chunk of time trying to balance it out so you could pretty consistently get to 5am, but that last hour is definitely a nightmare! The gong was so incredibly overpowered at first, that the game was too easy, and being such a short game I wanted to bank on repeated attempts. I feel that sometimes, you're just going to have a bad run. I have a few solutions to this that I was tweaking, but finding that perfect balance is tricky!
Thinking about the sprites creatively: I will admit that a lot of that mentality came from watching all of the "jam off the same art kit" videos Miz posted. I've watched all of them, it's how I discovered his YT channel and this jam! Making all of the spirits was really enjoyable, and I'm thrilled that people liked the visual style of my game!
Anywho, sorry for the novella there. You provided some really excellent feedback, so I figured I would share a bit more about the development process! The "calm before the storm" idea is great, and something to distract the player before engaging them is a great technique I need to learn to implement for future projects. Thank you again for playing and commenting! It's greatly appreciated!