Thanks for playing!
That was a deliberate choice; it definitely flowed better without kicking you to the ship but I was trying to find ways to convey that **SPOILERS** it's all a dream, and dreams tend to flow weirdly and repeat and stuff. **END SPOILERS**
I'm glad you enjoyed the mechanics! Those are going straight into Shattered 2 and I consider them the most important part of this game.
I think I've mentioned this before but the game was entirely playtested with a crosshair, I just forgot to enable it by default before shipping the game and didn't test thoroughly enough to test it. Namely I never tested on anything but my dev machine, which of course had the config file with crosshair set to always show. I skipped what is normally part of my testing regime to save time and suffered the consequences. That said, the bolts do have a sort of magnetism/aim assist so it's still playable.
I pretty much do 2.5D exclusively these days, because while I'm not good at drawing I'm hopeless at modeling. The Freedoom enemies were chosen for no other reason than to save time; I'm not terribly happy with their inclusion as they don't really match the rest of the game.
I fixed this at some point, but originally you could actually drain Sakura for health and since she's immortal and always friendly it was basically a free action. Eventually I implemented regenerating health and dramatically slowed down the magic recharge, so it wouldn't be a cheese strategy now anyway.