Thanks for playing and for the great feedback! I had fun writing the dialogue.
The game may be more punishing than it's meant to be largely due to me not making obvious some important mechanics (e.g. holding SHIFT lets you dash longer, dashing over multiple waves in one dash is heavily rewarded, touching demonic activities/structures throughout the circle will heal you a pretty large amount, etc.).
There is a sound on collapsing buildings, but it's proximity-based and fairly wimpy. Definitely agree we could've done better there and on the feeling of destruction in general.
Very much agree on the space-to-skip confirmation too. Unfortunately, the skip feature was added very late and I didn't notice how easy to was to miss important instructions until post-release.