Thank you for such a detailed review,
We were actually inspired by the final station, as our game designer pitched this idea at our first meeting, I'm glad you were able to draw the parallel between the two! We wanted to opt out of having combat because we thought that many entries would be using combat as their main source of the "Last Stand" feeling, so to stand out we decided to completely omit combat. However early on in prototyping we had the idea of a gun with limited bullets however that was quickly overriden.
We didn't have time to introduce a pause mechanic (which we would have used to stop time while the player read notes) and we wanted to throw little notes around levels further teaching the player about the world and game mechanics, however due to scheduling issues we had to only focus on the core gameplay loop and make it playable!
Thank you for taking the time to play our game.