Ah thank you fo playing despite the confusion! Yeah, the door to Townvania does not unlock until the first two objectives are cleared, the last of which is activating the savepoint as you said. The current objective is always displayed in the HUD and there is a green compass/arrow to guide the player. There's also a minimap with the objective and player position both highlighted. This is all mentioned in the intro dialogue, but I think I could have made it explicitely obvious in a tutorial or something. The save point visibility is another issue I only noticed later. I tried to make it more obvious by adding a "radar" sfx and some alert text in the HUD but thats not mentioned anywhere so the player wouldn't know to look for it :/.
The soft-locking out of certain areas is a definite design flaw I lazily overlooked. The enemies all respawn when the map is reloaded, but thats annoying esp if player hasn't reached the first save point (after that u can just fast travel). I will say that I am only aware of one place this can occur which is the highest platform of the first map, so I'm definitely curious to know the others you found!
Thank you so much for your time and feedback! It really means a lot to me.