I had a lot of fun 100%ing this. I'm not usually a completionist but it was easy and rewarding to explore one bite-sized chunk at a time, especially with how many secrets were crammed into each corner of the map.
It took me about 5 hours to complete without a guide, although I wish I had noticed the game speed modifier before I won - exploration demands backtracking and retreading the same couple of rooms can get a little tedious at the 1x speed.
Some SPOILER-HEAVY thoughts and minor bugs -
I tend to explore in depth before I explore broadly and so I was able to rise to ranks 2 and 3 having barely scratched the surface of some places. Once you can carry three items at once, item-shuffling becomes kind of trivialized - either you're going somewhere you expect to swim or somewhere you expect to run, but rarely both. That's not against the design of the game but I will say I don't think that the item swapping was a big part of my experience after the first hour or two.
I thought the mole puzzle was a little confusing - it wasn't very clear to me that, upon them simply appearing, I had done everything I needed to do. I thought it was a bug that they wouldn't reappear or that I couldn't get them to show up while I was close enough to talk. I'm not even sure where I saw the factory entrance mole, and I don't think I was close enough to the pillar mole to for it to be visible when it appeared. My expectation was that I would have to speak to them; I only completed the mission accidentally by returning to the mole room to reread the dialogue. The reward for that was nice, although, as the very last thing I managed to do in the game, a little useless - but you can't really prevent that.
The other puzzle I walked away from with a slightly sour taste was the effigy puzzle. It's not that the solution didn't make sense, but the True Key room you go through to get there had some (I think unique) statues that really threw me off. I left the area and did the whole magic pot journey all over again just to be sure I was recreating those exactly! I liked the actual effigy, I just felt that that was an unintended red herring (at least for me).
I found it slightly annoying that the map button defaulted to showing me the 3D world map. I liked that perspective, I think it helped make the game feel like a comprehensive world instead of a bunch of stitched-together rooms, but 99% of the time I was hitting tab because I wanted to check where I was and where I was going on a room-by-room basis.
I really enjoyed the little stuff hidden in out-of-the-way places for map completionists like myself to find. The weird little creature in the sky with coffee was great, as was the hint guy's lair.
I also thought the magic pot areas were a neat concept. I've only played the version where the patched-in hint was present (was it the snow guy dialogue? the map?) but it added a fun puzzle to retracing your steps to already fairly out-of-the-way places. I liked the flavor of them being mostly "special" places - shrines and such. Full disclosure, I superimposed the hint map over the tab-menu map in an image editing tool, but this is the kind of game where taking notes is hardly cheating.
There were a handful of small bugs I ran into -
- I got a crash during the Ice Master fight - unfortunately, I didn't copy the error, but I think it mentioned an alarm. It may have had something to do with an attack triggering on a hand that was above the ceiling of the room. That was the only crash I encountered, though.
- The treasure mimic boss behaves oddly if you bring one of the chests from two rooms prior into its arena. Specifically, when it charges, it'll bounce off the chest as if it were the screen edge, go reeling into the actual screen edge, "land" in midair, and then charge across nothing as if it were on the ground. More silly than harmful, and not terribly useful to cheese the fight, since it still bounces around and the chest can vanish or get in your way.
- Particle effects from torches and the magic jar tend to go into overload when you pause or look at the map for a while and then resume. Induced some surprising lag, though nothing harmful. Something similar is possible if you hold the spawn-vines button while standing close enough to a torch that it can burn them on instantiation.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this, enough to write up a small essay of thoughts and feedback. Of course I wouldn't expect you to change it post-release based on a rando itch comment but I like to ramble when my brain's been this deep in a game.
Looking forward to what you make next!