Original loop was going to be  have the player grow a certain number of plants and have a fuel system like nectar that the player had to collect to keep spreading flowers east and west. Not enough time so just removed all of it.

Yeah its hard to tell since with my headphones it sounded normal. I had similar issue with another game where my monitor had higher contrast than what most people were playing on so the game was dark for everyone but me. I tried it on my laptop and it was indeed waaaaay too dark even if it was supposed to be a horror game. Lesson is to always have someone else try the game first on different hardware than yours.