First of all, love the quest. But something that seems really obvious to me, even on my first playthrough, was that once you battle your way back up successfully, exit the dungeon, and then go fight something and die, you get sent allllll the way back down to the last whisper you spoke with.
The thing is, after successfully fighting my way back up out of the dungeon i exit right at the first big boss fight and so just run right in there without really thinking about having to save at the whisper.
The player must remember immediately upon exiting the dungeon that they must talk to a whisper as highest priority or, first death, you get sent alll the way back down. Intuitively, since the dungeon is a dead end out and back (nothing further to do there), i would expect the whisper to reset to the closest to the entrance outside the dungeon. Rather than putting the responsibility on the player to remember to talk to a whisper or have to go through the tedious (with all monsters reset) dungeon ALL OVER AGAIN.
It seems to me there is an easy fix. Backtracking should be avoided in level design. The experience would have been non-remarkable other than the fun part of successfully completing a hard dungeon, unfortunately that good will soured quickly when i died my first death afterwards to the big boss and ended up way the hell down inside Iona’s Bloom again.
You could call the player forgetful and silly for not remembering to talk to the whisper, and i am sure we would deserve it, but its not fun. It kind of kills the fun actually. Auto reset the whisper to the closest one to the dungeon entrance upon completing the potions seller’s quest seems like an obvious fix.
Other than that, the game has so much potential in this early access version. I look forward tremendously to digging into the town and getting to end game.