Thanks Lukas! I appreciate your feedback. It is definitely too much too fast, especially to learn it. The pausing is cumbersome and not a great solution to let the player catch their breath. Ideally we could have let the player dictate entirely how slow or fast they moved. But we didn't end up having time to implement it. So it could be almost turn based. I admit we didn't think of that, too much but I think it could be a good approach :). Although I did also like the idea of bag management and item usage being the core gameplay challenge too.
Hard agree on slowing the game down as a default though. Thats definitely the right call.