Thanks for playing!
About the running sections, they're actually designed in a way that if the enemy can't see the player they gain a really large speed boost to make sure the player always has the feeling they're right behind them, but their actually movements arent that fast when they're close. In the third chase particularly the section at the end is definitely the harder part since whenever you turn the corner the enemy will quickly boost to the corner you just turned around, which really added to the effect of being close to dying.
Far as I know i've not had anyone ACTUALLY struggle to complete the chases, as you said maybe one or two deaths on the third chase but other than that I think it's balanced enough to feel intense and close without actually being frustrating. The first chase is also extremely slow when close to the player, since it's the first chase the player encounters so I didn't want it to feel unfair to suddenly have to start running super quickly to escape. I think you can actually just auto-walk and still escape from that one.
And yeah I figured out the 4th levels encounter rate was actually a mistake on my part setting the encounter rate to 50% instead of just the escape-chance to 50%. oops. In a way the pray to light mechanic is kind of intentional as a reward for good situational-awareness, but it definitely might be too strong
Thanks for the feedback.