Hello and congratulations! Many many thanks for taking the time to finish the game and also for the very thorough and insightful feedback. It is extremely valuable. I agree with your take on the wall slide. I need to give the possibility of assigning it its own key (and implementing input remapping as suggested by other kind jammers). It should also suffice to just hold the key without the direction, I added the direction requirement because it was misbehaving but it was probably my fault (using is_on_wall BEFORE move_and_slide). I need to make it more robust and relying on a single key hold.
To think that I spent about 1 hour to have the physics keep simulating after dying before triggering the respawn because I thought it was a little bit hilarious!! But I can understand it being annoying after a couple times. It's easy to add a button press to force the respawn or have a toggle option to fast forward it.
Again, thank you very much for the kind words and I am glad you had a good time with the game despite its rough edges.
Cheers