To start with especially, the atmosphere in this is really incredible. I really appreciate the effort you put into making animations for the characters; the shadow figures that crawl towards you are peculiarly unsettling, and the main character’s frolick helps set a strong feeling of danger. The sounds you picked really help as well; the flashlight sounds impotent enough that when I started, I felt really helpless. I think it captured that feeling of a nightmare really nicely.
My main criticism is that, I guess as with most horror games, horror part of it started to fade as the game went on. For the first phase, where I was frantically scrambling away from the shadows, barely hitting them in time, wondering what might be next, it was really unsettling. After I got my timing down though, I became pajama-boy superman and started effortlessly juking the monsters and one-shotting them several at a time, which eroded the feeling of horror and mystery a lot, even though the ramping up of the soundtrack and stuff still helped alleviate that a bit. I think if I were to prioritize one change, maybe randomizing the monster speeds a little bit, so I couldn’t get used to their timing so much, would alleviate that issue? Or that could get annoying, I’m not sure. Something to keep up the feeling of helplessness though.
In all I thought it was really atmospheric and nice, especially for the first level.