so i have a handful of like, small complaints i want to get out of the way first:
1. after seeing the text "welcome back" i was under the impression that the game was going to save my progress. from what i can tell this is not the case, which is not unexpected for a jam game, but it does mean i lost my progress after quitting after my first play session.
2. i watched the intro cutscene a few times as at first i did not even realize the two names were different because they're both orange and a very similar length. i think you should recolor piper's name as gwynn's name matches her hair color which is what made me think all the cutscene text belonged to her.
3. i personally have a kind of hard time dealing with the amount of progress that you lose when you mess up an expedition. this may be because i simply didn't play long enough to get more comfortable with the mechanics. but, i did find it a tiny bit stressful to play through knowing that if i mess something up i'll have to do it all over again.
but now for what i did like.
i think the core gameplay loop of scouting out different things is fun and has a surprising amount of depth. e.g., scouting plants to make scouting the animals more efficient, or scouting rocks to scout more rocks in the future. these little gameplay patterns were nice and i think there's a lot of room to add many more. (i only got through the first expedition so perhaps there were even more variations in the later ones already).
the general way that exploring dark tiles gives you energy which then must be expended on scouting is a cool way to handle this kind of system. it is the kind of thing that slightly stresses me out, due to the limited number of dark tiles, but i do think it is a very effective way to implement exploration gameplay. there's a lot of fun choices about where to go next, e.g. trying to reveal more tiles around something to use the companion versus just trying to scout something with a high energy cost to earn at least some xp before capping the energy bar.
i really like the fact that making room for your companion makes scouting more effective. it's a very natural way to make the companion an important part of the player's experience. it also makes the scouting feel more strategic, as e.g. when i scouted the familiar i made sure to clear out a nearby rock first so there was more room.
the way that the spell slots each correspond to a specific shape of potion is a fun little mechanic.
if i have time i do think i want to come back and try to do more expeditions. i think it is legitimately quite fun to go through the game, but just difficult to find the time to do it in one sitting.