Wow, thank you so much for this feedback! This took a lot of effort and I appreciate it!
I've got a pretty large list now of things I need to fix and implement and this added nicely to it.
Rant time.
The settings/pause menu in game I'm pretty upset about because I couldn't get it working properly in Godot and spent a chunk of time trying to figure out why it wasn't working as expected: There's some bug with nested Viewports (post processing layers atop the main scene) that I need to report or search for, where the Process setting doesn't allow inherited values to change. So for example, usually your Settings UI node will have a process mode setting of "when paused" and so when you pause the tree that node should now be running! But no matter what I did that node was always in the paused state as well. Only when I set the nested Viewports to process mode always would it work... But that means everything else will run. So I would have had to manually set all nodes I wanted to pause to Pauseable. It ended up being a huge PITA and I decided to scrap it and move on.
Need to make time to file a bug report for Godot and maybe work on it myself.
Phew now that that's outta my system. Great feedback, suggestions and testing. I really appreciate it.
Thanks for the time to play it and giving feedback.