Thanks for playing and for the video! Always super useful to watch people playing. I hope the lack of audio isn't a problem on my end.
Yeah, so, whether conciously or not, running away has definitely not been designed with strafing in mind. Whenever I'm playing the game and need to run away I never strafe, I always rotate. Rotating does also make you vulnerable but I've just run the numbers now and it is indeed slightly quicker to rotate twice and sprint between the rotations than to strafe. The difference is increased when you take into account how the monster moves as he can start moving to a tile as soon as you've started to move off it. So when you start strafing the tile you're leaving is immediately available for the monster to occupy and he could be much closer to you.
I definitely think I should try and make rotating and strafing around obstacles equally viable in the post-jam version. The normal speed has already been increased in the post-jam version which has probably closed the gap a bit. To fully close it maybe it's as simple as allowing sprinting to slightly increase the strafe speed.
I actually thought I'd fixed the monster not being able to kill you if you just keep going at the normal speed but it looks like there are still circumstances where it struggles in this build. This is definitely (hopefully!) fixed in the post-jam version, mostly by speeding up his attacks.
It make sense to me that tapping sprint would increase your average speed but I also don't know how effective that is as a strategy.