The custom art and the slick presentation really sell the space setting, firstly; using a screen to show sprites is a fun touch, and I like the thoughtful use of color. Some nitpicks, though: the menus in the title screen are hard to read without any kind of overlay between the text and the background, and some sprites appear to be heavily affected by .webp compression. The file format supports a lossless mode that still beats .png, so that might be worth looking into for a small game where file sizes aren't an issue.

I feel like your writing has improved since MAY WOLF 2024, but there are still potential areas of improvement. A big thing affecting the flow of the prose is how wordy the narration can get. For instance, consider the line "Our job is to innovate as we see needs arise" – even without external context, you could safely cut at least "we see", and maybe even get rid of the whole later chunk: "Our job is to innovate." I think doing this kind of tightening would make for a smoother read, especially when there's lots of technical vocabulary used. Also, a slight tendency for characters to say their traits out loud persists ("I don't do well in emergency situations!") but there's less of it now.

As for some more technical remarks, the intro segment jumps between 1st and 3rd person and present and past tense, and while it's more consistent later on, this kind of thing could be cleaned up in the editing pass. There's lots of repetition, too. As an example, two consecutive text boxes start with "After the incident with my father" and "Since my father is gone", and singular words reoccur as well: "A giant hole has been blasted through the wall. ... he had been blasted a good 20 feet away". The word "additional" gets used thrice in this text box: "He repeated this step for a few additional cycles while returning to the base to fetch an additional suit for the penguin and to message the orca for additional assistance."

I do like the fun procedural stuff going on in the story – I think the writing is maybe a little too detached to fully sell the immense stakes and the sense of danger, but the logistics of how everything works feel meticulously thought out, and it's fun to get an opportunity to explore the setting in the interactive section. The conspiracy thriller part is less compelling. The setups and the payoffs aren't quite honed enough, leaving the mystery to be unraveled largely by being explained as the events play out. Case in point, the middle section feels pretty slow to read because the plot basically comes to a halt when it should be building up towards the climax. It feels like there's a segment missing where the characters investigate the situation, new information gets revealed, the final twists are foreshadowed in more detail, and so on; the structure just comes off as kind of weird.

For shortform fiction, Polar Opposites may just be trying to do too many things that don't quite fit together at once – it feels like an amalgamation of different threads the narrative sometimes focuses on instead of one big interlayered story. That and a lot of polish issues prevent the whole from reaching the level of its best ideas and most thrilling parts, I think.