It's nice to see something this formally ambitious in the jam. The result feels slightly clunky and underplaytested, however; how vague the feedback is and how easy it is to misinterpret as the game misleading you means that it's too easy to lose track of what you're doing and what you already tried. How much new text there is across iterations, tricking you into thinking you discovered something new or are on the right track, doesn't help. Simple as the underlying mechanism may be, the game doesn't communicate it well enough to provide compelling puzzle gameplay – I spent more time wondering how exactly this thing works (do you need to exhaust all options & see all text? do you need to make whatever the correct choices are just once, across multiple iterations, or during a single one?) than "solving" it. (as in, looking at the script because it was really just not fun anymore and i was afraid i had somehow misunderstood the point)
The prose gets points for style, even if the dialog in particular feels overwrought and rhythmically weak at times. Between that and the image choices and the audio design, there's definitely a mood successfully established. I don't mind the character portraits remaining quite thin – it feels purposeful. Those two guys who show up sometimes not amounting to a lot or not leaving much of an impression maybe feels like a slight misstep; there was room to exaggerate them a little just to juice up the character interactions.
As for the ending, I feel like it lacks the proper buildup to land as an anticlimax. The tension dissipates away in the "gameplay" portion, at least if you're spending a lot of time stuck in it, but it doesn't feel like this is taken into account – the story essentially goes from 0% to 100% and the abruptly ends. There's nothing too surprising or incongruent about the general nature of the climax, but it just doesn't feel like it follows from what comes before tonally.
Apathesis deserves praise for taking a big swing and its strong sense of style, but the final product is often too frustrating for its own good.