Hey, thank you! I'll ping you on Discord to see if I can understand what's going on with a repeating lock sound. If you were in Sonar Mode and turning your head around a lot, this is expected, because the Village has a lot of targets in it, but that should stop as soon as you release Sonar Mode, so I'm guessing you experienced something else entirely. Is it possible that you had another controller connected to the same PC that was accidentally squeezing its triggers? I've had that happen while debugging. I'm guessing you didn't get to any combat or the dungeon, so I'd love to figure this out so you can experience some of the game post-intro.
That's an interesting point about automatically moving to the first choice prompt. Do you mean that after the last line of dialog is read, the game could just play the chime and advance to the first choice without waiting for a confirmation? That would bypass the ability to repeat the last line of dialogue, but I honestly don't know how often people are using that feature anyway, so this seems like it would be an easy option to add for anyone who wants that behavior. Maybe even have a full auto-advance mode setting for people confident that they won't need any repeats at all, and just want to speed through the story.
For the spatial audio, there's a setting that I disabled last minute because of some negative feedback in the Discord. You may find it more intuitive to navigate if you enable it:
Settings > Accessibility > Sight-based volume attenuation
This just means "sounds are louder and more clear when looking directly at something, and more quiet when they're behind you." The earlier versions of the game had this behavior on all the time, but I made it into an option and defaulted it off because one of my testers actually found that it made it more difficult to navigate compared to other games, so it seems like a personal preference. I will admit that when I play the game, I rely very heavily on the Sonar + Lock-On system, so I don't think there are enough ambient audio sources around the environment to navigate purely based on audio.
Also, one of the chickens is deliberately slightly hidden! Two of them should be very close by to the pen and hopefully easy to locate, but the third requires a little bit of exploration (and maybe talking to an NPC for a hint) to find. But, finding the chickens is purely optional, as is most of the content in the Village. There is another NPC who will give you the Bow, which will let you leave the Village and explore more!
Thanks again for taking the time to play and give detailed feedback. We appreciate it!