Nice idea! I tried doing something similar but with no backtracking to ease the process (you were falling down the well)
https://boticelly.itch.io/where-are-you-kitty
I also did a permadeath-like mechanic: the game ends when you run out of "guts" and starts over. Regarding randomness, I also added several randomized quests to spice things up and give players some rewards for exploration. For example, when you meet a ghost, they ask you to find their grave. As you encounter graves along the way, there is a random chance for each of them to have the ghost's name on it.