Thanks so much! I really appreciate the comments, and I'm glad you felt some suspense when playing the game (and am really glad to hear your tried out the brightness setting!).
Your softlock is really interesting, and that is a great consideration for level design in the future. I'm also going to work harder next time on teaching the player how to play the game. It was a realisation we had coming to the end that it was a bit unclear how to actually play the game, but we didn't foresee the true impact of that until getting more feedback.
P.S. your game is beautiful, and I really enjoyed the art style. I'm going to be posting to it sometime this weekend when I get more time to finish it.