I just tried again, and I like it, though I still things it takes too long to get back to the action once you know the interesting stuff happens down there.
I only got bad potions in chests, I may be unlucky, but after that just i just avoided them altogether.
I would think it doesn't need to have a specific button to press to open a chest though, if you made the effort to land on something, you certainly want to interact with it, maybe after a one second wait or something like that.
Aaand I would prefer to play with the arrows rather than WASD, because one of my computers got a AZERTY keyboard.