Hi!
First of all thanks for playing and for the feedback!
When you first encounter the "zombie" girl you unlock sprinting by holding shift, there was even a prompt right after you picked up the acid bottle, you should be able to run, the little girl can't kill you in the locker even if she sees you entering, unlike the other one, so you can just hide in the locker if she starts crawling towards you, when you reload the power puzzle checkpoint for some reason the zombie girl will come to that room, you can wait in the locker until you cant hear her anymore, and wait for the little girl to go forward or right so you can avoid her, (if you look right when you leave the door, there is a new door that leads you back to the water dispenser from the start), there are ways to avoid them but not regular ones, one of them is, after you open the door with the acid, the left door has enough space for you to hide behind it while the zombie girl passes, she can only start chasing you if she sees you, basically as long as you are behind them, they cant see you, but they stop and turn around often. (they can't hear you either)
Also you can hide in the elevators if you manage to close the door before they get to you, and just wait until they are gone.
If you say you tried every button and sprinting with SHIFT really doesn't work for you, then maybe you encountered a very rare bug that i've never seen in my hundreds of tests...if so, starting over might be the only fix.
Also, once you quit the game, it doesn't save...those checkpoints are only for that instance...so if you play it again you will have to start over im afraid...
As for the performance, the game initially had 8 GB (which ate 6GB VRAM lol ) after days of "optimization" the game is now 1.5GB and not looking as great as i wanted :(
Thanks for getting back to me so quick, I think I know why things happened in the way they did.
When I had played the first time I checked and found that bottle fairly quickly but once she popped out I didn't expect her to come kill me right away (thinking it was just a jump scare and calling her bluff by going right up to her lol).
When she got me the game reloaded at the new checkpoint and the acid was still on the shelf, so instead of picking it up what I did was instead go explore everything else waiting to trigger her until I was ready, or so I thought, I assume now that the bottle being clicked created a new save point and dying after that reloaded as if I had already poured it where you are supposed to.
So in my mind I didn't have the acid yet, didn't activate zombie girl, then after completing the electrical puzzle and heading in the direction of the elevator the daughter got triggered, then after dying the second time both girls were out roaming around.
To me it didn't make sense at the time, but it does now. As I thought reloading would bring me before they were triggered.
I never noticed that it came up saying I can sprint now, as I let her just kill me the first time lol. Now that I know that I gotta try again but that makes sense. It's not like I'm far at all, I just wanted to make sure I had a chance, I'm going to restart so I can see it properly.
I tried shift from the beginning, and it didn't work which makes sense after your explanation and I tried using it again when trying to get away from her just out of habit and maybe it did work but I didn't notice because it was dark in the area, either way you answered everything I was curious about. I tried to be somewhat obscure, so I didn't give away anything big. Thank you for the help.
You are welcome!
I guess the saving code is broken if you loaded the game and you found the chained doors open even though you didn't pick the acid again which is weird because in my version i fixed these kind of saving-problems...But yes, you need to pick up acid to be able to sprint, the game saves when you enter the storeroom.