NOTE: Also spoilers. Lots of them.
Super useful feedback! It sounds like you were an unfortunate victim of probability. There's actually close to a 50% chance of escaping the hunters in the truck if you run, and additional variations when you have a companion. Also if you manage to get a loaded pistol before running into them, things turn out very differently. With more time though, I would have loved to tweak the probabilities a bit, add a bunch of extra variables, and even find a way to make repeated events less likely when you hit a replay button. Definitely a concept I'd like to revisit.