This game is remarkable to say the least. Absolutely digging the intro part and the pool segment. The voice acting. graphics, sound design and overall atmosphere is top notch. The environment resembles a recurring dream/nightmare of mine. For that reason, this is in my opinion a true horror game for people with aquaphobia / claustrophobia.
I've always had claustrophobia coupled with the thought of being stuck underwater. This has been apparent to me ever since I played Banjo-Kazooie's Clanker's Cavern. That N64 game features a specific segment in which the player needs to swim through a set of pipes and choose the correct one to get the required collectables. Mostly due to lack of time to turn around, the players won't have enough oxygen left when they choose to swim through the wrong pipe. If you don't know the title, I suggest looking it up on YouTube to see what I mean.
Anyway, I'd get lots of recurring dreams in which I'd go into some sort of indoor rapids that were 'cave' themed, going downwards crazy fast, branching into multiple paths possibly. Eventually I'd see two a two-way slide entrance, one of them being pitch black. I couldn't roll over to the other side because of the current, resulting into me being thrown into that pitch black slide pulling me underwater entirely.
Those creepy memories immediately resurfaced during playing this game. So yeah, for this reason I'm greatly impressed with this game so far.
Here are some ideas/suggestions I'd love seeing implemented some day:
• A few 3D trees, foliage or hints of architecture in the distance during the intro part outside.
• When auto-saving, an animated icon pops up on the screen.
• The water shader is stunning. It just needs soft-edge smoothing similar to Unity's particle shaders to smooth out the transition between geometry and the water itself.
• A perlin noise shake added to the camera during balancing on the water slide. Sort of like in Far Cry 3, when going up the radio towers.
• Fall damage for extremely high places. Similar to Mirror's Edge, in which the sound design and wobbling screen makes it really scary to fall.
• The water pump that breaks the electrical lock, when the water is turned upon the panel, the player should get electrocuted , so it should only be interactable after the water pump is turned away from it again.
• Some water slides will make the player topple-over and ride the slide instead of being able to walk through it.
• The shadowy figure is perfect as is. Just needs more urgency when player is within it's reach to be more terrifying.
• The bright tiled hallways. You have a perfect opportunity to scare the player by suddenly letting tiles fall off the walls when walking past it.
• Some fluorescent lights will flicker and make that common glitch sound along with that.
• Landing on the water pipes needs a sound.
• The plants at the sideline of the lazy river come out of the stone ground. There should be some kind of pottery or a cast stone planter box.
Those are the things I could think of. As for the new mall area, these areas felt really empty and way too large. I think you should make more sense out of how the player would navigate through a abandoned mall in terms of it architecturally. Perhaps a more difficult electrical panel puzzle to have a shop open up it's gate. Crawling through ventilation shafts and corridors in which the player has to break through something or make use of a portable ladder. I'm really excited to see how this project evolves. :D