The time mechanic came straight from the theme actually! I thought about how you could join a player to a space, but rather than a physical connection, "what about a connection based upon rules?", and the timer was born!
To address your concerns, the physics were too closely tied to performance. We probably should have gone another route for those, however they probably would have been a lot easier to deal with if I'd tweaked the object weights a little rather than just leaving them based on their default mass (an easy fix that we just ran out of time to address).
Not signposting the exit door was unfortunately something we just ran out of time to do - I only needed another 20 minutes or so, but you know how it is with a time limit.
The environmental story telling didn't get any further than a notepad file. It was just out of scope for what we had to build. Absolutely would have improved the experience though!
We do plan on expanding upon this in the future.
Thanks for playing!