Hi Obsidian, thanks a lot for playing and especially for streaming our game. It was both exhilarating and teaching to witness your experience. I wanna get into both the things you write as well as what you mentioned in stream.
You're dead on with a lot of your critique, the smell component to the game loop is a bit hard to decipher. We wanted to make a dirt mound as you suggested with a tiny chest appear as you get closer to the scent, but ran out of time.
As for the bats; Currently there is one spawning every 20 seconds in a circle around you, and they do know where you are initially, but you can loose them if they're in the darkness. Which in hindsight is not enough, because it's very difficult to do since the player needs the light themselves. Conflicting design choices on our end. The bats die in two hits, there might be a bug that causes double collision. Also the vector math for throwing is not entirely accurate which definitely adds to the frustration if you're not used to it.
I really liked your intuitive idea of hiding in the shadows, which would've been an amazing element to implement to let the player trade some health for a bit of peace from the bats.
The bats not stopping during the dig and mini game was a conscious design choice, we wanted the player to be scared and have a sense of urgency while solving the minigame, however at this moment you can not exit the minigames, and if you don't open them, there is also no real alternative to dying (like hiding in the shadows). For the journals however, we didn't want the player to be punished for taking the time to read our story which is why we paused the game.
As you're developing, the game naturally becomes extremely easy to you. Now in post, we get some critique saying the game is way too easy, and others saying the bats are merciless or the chests are impossible to find (which is why we added the youtube video, a bandaid for lack of polish if you will). We definitely wanted the bats to be scary and provoke a reaction, but it shouldn't be frustrating.
Bottom line, this was the first project we did together, we did a lot of work and it's not perfect and definitely needed some more polish. We'll definitely work together again in another jam and hopefully craft an even better honed and rounded experience. Thanks for your feedback :)