Thanks for playing!
A Dream Of Valhalla does have Sakura and Gina in it, but it's ambiguously canon and doesn't have any important plot bits in it, so you're safe skipping that one. It was really more a dry run for the mechanics which will be in Shattered 2.
The story worked out better than I'd expected. I figured it would be pretty good, but maybe not to everyone's taste, but almost everyone seems to speak positively of the story. The diary was a bit of a gamble- I was worried in particular that it would kill the pacing- but it was a ton of fun to make and worked out well.
You're not the first one to report issues with the controls; I suspect I shipped an incorrect or incomplete control map.
I had a lot of ideas on how to make objectives clearer, but didn't implement any of them mostly because of time. I tried to make things as clear as possible with the tools I had available.
The phantom archer suppression sequence just didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped. It's aone of those things where you try something different in a jam, and sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't.
You're not actually the first one to suggest something Deus Ex like. I don't think it's likely, however. I prefer smaller projects these days- I tend to lose interest when they get too big, and it becomes stressful to have it in the background- so I don't see a large project in my future. Even Shattered 2 has grown into something bigger than I'd like.