thanks for the positive feedback!
it appears that you have encountered two bugs with the saving system in the game.
1. inside of the save houses there is supposed to be a old man you can talk to, it sounds like none of the npc's spawned for you.
2. because there was no one to save with, the game loaded a empty save when you died and pressed retry, placing the player at 32,32 (which is his starting point) and also not loading in any of the object.
these have been fixed in the post jam version of the game. though i believe i need to wait for voting to end to update it.