The game is indeed a bit slow, but it was done on purpose for the atmosphere's sake. I tried to compensate this making the player move faster and dash longer when the shield is not on. Also, what do you mean with "getting stuck"?
Having (maybe limited) control of the light source could have been interesting indeed, I also thought of blinding enemies with light but the point of the game is the trade-off between visibility and protection; if the light gave both of them, it wouldn't have made any sense.
Thanks for your feedback anyway!
Dashing towards a monster stuns it for a second, that way you can push it and get away from it, no rng at all. This is a somewhat "hidden mechanic" that I was hoping for the players to find out by themeselves while playing, since I thought that it would be natural to try dashing towards the monsters and see what the effects was. On my part, I should have added an explicit visual indicator of the stun, there is at least an audio cue for it.