Thanks a lot for such a long review!
I agree having a timer for drowning would have been a nice quality of life improvement. Yeah I focused more on the scale and a bit less on refinement, pretty much built all the areas in two days and only made small changes after that. There's actually a final boss in the last area as well haha. Every area has a boss so you went past the second one, it's very easy to miss though because the most clear path is to the beach zone. But as said, it doesn't matter when you defeat the bosses, they just give runes needed for accessing the final area and one stat upgrade each and you need to backtrack anyway. Yeah, especially the two totem poles section is where I expect many to just damage boost through, since they can't be avoided and can be a hassle to defeat. I wish I could have time to learn how to do a map that'd also update according where you've been, but I've never done that before. Would have been a great tool for navigating in such a big game.