Ah, the open endedness is the intended experience, haha. You can progress in one of four directions from the start and then you are pretty much locked into a linear path until you find the ability of that path. As you've noted with going right, there's a cave entrance that you can continue into and find they way forward. Or do you mean somewhere else?
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Ah interesting. I'm gonna give it another go later and check it out, sounds like an interesting concept. So a question, do you just spawn additional monsters as the player finds more upgrades (to keep the difficulty curve ramping up)? I think I noticed that the vampire things (I didn't look very closely, but they had a cape :P) didn't spawn until after my second upgrade, but maybe that was just coincidence.