Re: corpse locations: as soon as I hit post, I remembered these are people being hunted through a claustrophobic ship by a crazy monster, and they all probably have access to every room in the place. "Flee to wherever you can reach" is logically going to give you some 'illogical' hidey holes and randomly scattered items. Weird feeling is right. I don't think duplicated items is a big problem - the captain could plausibly have back-ups of any card/key, which scatters in the melee.
The replayability and sense of strange are totally sensible out-of-universe justifications too.