Thanks for playing!
I'm glad to hear the atmosphere was appropriately eerie. I'm curious to hear more about your encounter with the monster though. Were you standing in the light or have your flashlight on when the monster dropped out of the first vent in the storage room? The chase music only triggers when you're spotted, and seems like most other people I've seen play get spotted immediately. In that first room you can sneak past the monster, but there is a scripted chase sequence once you get to the other side of the catwalk outside. And when you say you baited it away from the door crank did you have to run around and lure it back to the room it first spawned in or something? I ask because I assumed that was largely impossible from how the search and chase sequence was setup lol. If you're interested, this speedrun of the game I made for a friend shows I kinda expected the sequence to go (I included timestamp from when the first monster sequence starts):
As you can see, you were effectively at the end. I'm glad someone made it to the door crank part though, in my opinion its the most tense part of the game.
And yes stealth is an option, which is what the visibility meter (light bulb icon) and audio meter are intended for. So the monster can see you from further away depending on how visible you are, and it can hear you from further away depending on how loud you are. But if it doesn't see the player when they're moving too loudly, the monster will move to investigate but isn't set to hostile right away. You can exploit this mechanic by throwing objects around in that room to distract the monster. Unfortunately the rushed nature of the demo doesn't provide any tutorializing in these mechanics too much, and the design of the first encounter makes it too easy for the player to just run right into the monster without warning. Also yes a save system is the number one item on the next major release, I've already implemented one for another project, its just that this project older and messier code that's a pain to update.
Yeah the health situation is another unfortunate side effect of features being implemented before they have a real use. So for the ultimate goal of this game in the long run, there's multiple enemy types planned, most of which are not 1-hit-kill. But to cut down on the scope and to try out the more ambitious features, like having AI crawl on walls and jump through vents, I focused on implementing one enemy type: the monster. The monster in the game is supposed to work similar to the xenomorph in Alien: Isolation, its the smartest and deadliest enemy in the game, and there's no way to kill it. There was also damage from objects colliding with the player at one point, but was removed for it being too easy for the player to kill themselves. So yes you can easily beat the demo level without ever picking up any painkillers, if anything they mainly serve to show that the player can heal themselves in some manner, and show off that items can stack in the inventory. They're planned to be much more useful in the next major update.
That's a good compliment to hear, because my plan is to polish and expand this into a 2-5 hour game over the next few years. I'm happy to hear the music was effective, the soundtrack in this game I made for an electronic music course for university and its the first real music I've ever made. I consciously tried to make the in-game logs and notes more practical and less dramatic so good to hear that worked out.