Thanks for this. The time pressure is the part of the game I go back and forth on the most, so having it laid out this clearly is really useful.
Some context first: the short-runs-early, longer-runs-later arc is intentional. Great Walk takes a lot of cues from games like Timber Rush and Agrivore, where the early loop is deliberately tight and each upgrade stretches it out. So the time pressure isn’t going away as a concept — but that doesn’t mean the current version of it is right, and a few of your points land.
Retreating mid-run — that already exists: press ESC and there’s a “retreat to town” option that ends the run early and banks everything you’ve gathered. You may have tried it before I added the end-of-run summary screen, which now lays out exactly what the march earned you — so both the option and what it does for you should be much clearer in the current build.
Too short early, too long late — the “short then long” part is by design, but the feel of “upgrade so the annoying thing gets less annoying” is a real problem. Framing the Lighthouse as expanding how far you can march instead of buying seconds is one idea — especially since the darkness is already a physical wall sweeping in from the right, so pushing that wall further out is a natural reframe of what’s on screen. No promises on a rewrite next week, but that’s one of the directions I want to explore.
Nothing to do after the wall — this is the part I’m actively building. The endgame goal is: unlock the infinite mode past the wall, get as far into it as you can, then reset the cycle to bank passive bonuses and push further on the next run. The latest build already adds a scripted run of escalating enemies past the wall — those waves are pretty thin right now, but they’ll keep growing, and I’m looking at extra incentives out there too, possibly tied to how many times you’ve reset. So it should already feel less like an empty gold farm than the version you played, and a lot less over time.
Really appreciate you taking the time to write all this out <3