Thank you so so much for the detailed feedback! <3 Yes, there is a lot of heart and soul in this project, from all of us :)
The voice was ever so slightly pitch shifted in an attempt to deal with it sounding older, but only by half an octave if that - otherwise it starts to sound very uncanny, haha. American McGee's Alice was one of the primary inspirations for this project, but it is going to be going off in its own direction - we're deliberately trying to keep the themes and story different from that game. It's actually quite interesting, because the other game designer on this project only really knows Alice Madness Returns, whereas I only know the original Alice, so we've got one foot more in the past and the other foot more in the modern era of gameplay mechanics etc (though I guess you can't really call Alice Madness Returns "modern" anymore, haha...)
Yes, the world will be made clearer through readable notes and clues, along with a brief intro cutscene of some kind, even if it's just 2D sketches with basic animation and a voiceover (along, of course, with environmental storytelling). In regards to giving the players more of a glimpse regarding the gameplay they can come to expect - at this stage, we're still not entirely sure ourselves! My knowledge of the 3d platforming genre is limited at best, but I played a lot of third person shooters when I was younger, so it'll be some kind of mashup between those two genres. I need to play some more 3d platformers to get a better sense of how it could function & maybe some more ideas.
What I can say is that there will be a puzzle element that comes down to learning and drawing sigils with your mouse or control stick to get past those puzzles and proceed, in order to break up the primary and secondary gameplay loops of platforming, attacking and item collecting. That mechanic is actually already entirely functional, it just never got integrated into the main game in time for the deadline...!
Mmm yes, I see what you mean about Amelia coming to a dead stop when she uses her melee attack while moving - in theory, as long as I can get an acceptable animation of her stepping forwards while attacking, I could integrate that into the game fairly easily - it might even make sense to make it a higher damage attack, given that the player has more momentum when they execute it, and also because it'd take more skill (i.e. timing) to do it correctly. That's a good idea and I'll definitely have a crack at it - thanks! As for the skeletons, you'll have to wait and see. ;)
AFAIK, Win 11 flags a lot of things as PUPs - that doesn't worry me too much. But the fullscreen mode not working on launch - yeah, that's something that I'd already picked up on and sorted out. The lag from hitting things with the wrench though... that's a new one. Do you mean when hitting boxes, hitting hay bales, hitting enemies or hitting the environment? (Or all four?) - I ask because each one of those uses different particles so it might help me isolate the issue ^^