This is good feedback!
We toyed with the idea of having the player be able to see around themselves as well as the cursor, but ultimately decided to just have the cursor illuminate the area to make for a more challenging adventure. That would have also been a good upgrade to get along the way *takes notes for a remastered version*.
I suppose the character moving too fast is also subjective. In order to ramp up the platforming challenges throughout the later parts of the game, it felt like we needed the movement speed, but we didn't toy with that much through our testing, since it felt fine to us (we were also super used to the mechanics and physics by then though, too).
Pressing SHIFT skips cutscenes, I forgot to post that on the game page. Oops!
I think some of the "darkness" would be solved by having some sort of tileset for the black blocks. That was something we were working on, but didn't get it done/polished in time to have a unique tileset for each area.
Thanks for your feedback though! It's great to get outside perspectives, as playing your own game, you tend to overlook a lot of things.