: I can't for the life of me—or my avatar—dance and dodge around even the harmless Headless with any sort of consistency.
I'm still pretty terrible, but the thing that helped me the most was the ANYWHERE cheat. Save right before you trigger a couple of Headless, and then you can practice just that one spot until you've learned the Headless' speed and patterns. Try dodging at different times, or see how it goes if you take the fight to them vs. waiting for them to approach you. For me, I'd tend to forget what I'd learned in the walk back from the save rune, so this finally taught me enough to get consistent.
Fortunately, as you point out, you don't have to become an expert, you only need to get good enough to survive a decent fight. In Pathways, there's a big difference between staying alive long enough to reach the next goal, and staying alive long enough to figure out what the next goal actually is. Hamish's walkthrough and the maps are huge time/frustration savers in that regard, if you're like me and don't have hundreds of hours to devote to just one game.
: I suck particularly hard with the default keyboard controls, and as far as I can tell there's no way to change the key bindings and no mouse control available.
If you're used to mouse-control FPSes, Pathways can feel very wrong. When I had a similar problem with a different game, I switched to a gamepad, so it felt different and my keyboard/mouse muscle memory didn't get in the way. If you have one, or an Xbox 360 or PS3 controller, try it with Enjoy2 and you might find a control scheme that works for you.
Best of luck! PiD's atmosphere is better experienced by playing it than just reading about it, so I hope you make it far enough to see that for yourself. And if you discover any other tricks that make the game easier to pick up, please share them with us!
