Ah so many kind words! Thank you so much! I'm so glad you liked it. I'm never very confident in my ability to convey horror so I'm so happy to hear that you thought it worked haha.
In regards to the soft locking I wanted to say that you're SUPPOSED to get full healed after each encounter in the final dream. So if you weren't that also might be a bug making things more difficult than it was meant to be. If there are still enemies before the boss alive though it might be possible to salvage that. (Just make sure you kill the bosses eyes first so it becomes blinded if you're not strong enough...and pray to rng lol). I appreciate all the bug reports as well. It's very helpful to have.
The last thing I wanted to address is the book puzzle. I'm not entirely sure what you meant by smallest to largest? But the idea was just to read them and place them in chronological order. Either way that puzzle seems to be the main one that people have had trouble with so it wasn't as clear as it should have been, nor did it have enough clues sprinkled in the stories I think. But oh well, these things happen when you can't thoroughly hand it off for testing lol.
Thanks so much again for taking the time to share your thoughts! It means a lot!