First of all, thanks a lot for trying out the tutorial and for giving the game another shot like you said! Secondly thank you so much for your amazing feedback! 

Unintuitive menu: I was a bit worried that people might have a hard time even navigating the menu, but your example of using the down arrow in order to get to the tutorial, only to start the game just sealed the deal. I've decided to stop messing with the sanctity of the arrow keys and just use I/J/K/L to perform actions. The arrow keys are now an alternative movement/menu navigation option. There are now overlays on the action buttons showing what key to press for each buttons as well. 

Tutorial: Thanks for spotting that soft lock, the player now starts with enough arcane shards to craft every they can and still complete the crafting tutorial. I've also made all tutorial rooms smaller so that objective text can be seen more easily.

Door Buttons: My hope was that after completing the tutorial, a player would start the game and investigate the only thing they hadn't yet seen before. Then hopefully they would recognize the door button as something they could interact with after walking up to it. But if more people seem to still be confused as to using the door buttons, it won't be a huge deal to add another tutorial for it.

High tier enemies next to starting room: Thing is, high tier enemies can only spawn two rooms away from the center of the dungeon, it's just that the center of the dungeon is actually the boss room, not the starting room. So try finding the boss room first, then exploring its surrounding rooms to find a broken weapon. Don't forget that all damage (except for special attacks) can be negated by using the correct protection spell.

Timer: The timer now flashes red on every minute. I also plan to make it beep in some way but I'm just waiting until after I add the music.

Once again thanks so much for your feedback!

Thanks very much for taking the extra effort to understand my game! I definitely agree with you about sound effects, that's what I'm currently working on implementing now, so look out for those in the next update to the game.

As I've mentioned in my reply to the comment below, I do think there's plenty of room for improvement in the area of guiding the player toward progress, especially when they first start out. Apart from making the game much more enjoyable, sound effects could add some much needed audio ques to make the game more understand.

Lastly, do you think you could elaborate on what's grindy? Was it just fighting enemies, or the game in general?

Thanks for your honest feedback! I am realizing that it can be rather confusing going in and that the game needs to give more player feedback, so I'm working to improve it in that regard. 

As for getting killed while having the menu up, that's definitely a bug so thanks for spotting it!

In the next patch I'll be adding text pop-ups when the player is near something interactable so they know it's something important. I'll also add the typical "accept" and "exit" to the menu screen so that the buttons to press are hopefully more noticeable. 

I hope you'll give the game another shot!