I'm quite touched by the fact you played as much as you did and took the time to write all this, so I'll do my best to address what I can.
The intro sequence you can press space to skip, I intended to put a visual que for that, but time got the better of me.
The UK centricity is only on the two rooms, if you had selected the other path you would have had two different rooms with different riddles, one of which is puzzle based and the other being American based.
The fire room is referencing the great fire of London, it was started in a bakery hence the rye reference, so you were leading to the right track. I did have another clue for that room but again time was against me .
As for the lore, the concept is that you are actually the detective from the first Cutscene viewing the tape pulled from the victim. While you play as the victim you can find some lore based pickups (I didn't get to put as much as I'd have liked) that hint towards the killer having a likening to "augmented surgery". The character of the killer is meant to establish his insanity while also showing himself to believe he is of high intellect and sets up these puzzle rooms to 1. Test his patients and 2. Record the results of his experiments. I can't delve too far into the lore as this is a smaller piece to what I intend to be a much larger game.
The idea of having the player use web search to find answers is simply an extra layer of meta mechanics that I wanted to play with. Some people enjoy trivia and I wanted to use a mechanic that wasn't used much and would actively get the player thinking in a different way than the usual physical game puzzles.
I chose riddles that were based on famous events, concepts or serial killers as I figured they would be the most known worldwide.
I wasn't aware of the multiple respawn floor glitch, though I think I have a good idea why that might happen so I will look into that for post jam fixes along with a laundry list of improvements and changes thanks to critiques like this.
Thankyou for playing and I'm glad you enjoyed what you did get to play, I'll take into consideration these points.
PS, I'm Australian not English 🙂