thanks for your extensive comment! respectfully: i feel like you're overthinking a lot of things.
this kind of text just works such that there is no coherent fictional reality to it, no consistent logic behind how its various layers correspond to each other or what functions the characters serve in any given scene. starting with a clearly "non-narrative" bit to frame the rest was a very deliberate choice; that's the primary lens you're supposed to be reading the game through.
despite it being subordinate the essay-esque framing, there is a story somewhere in there, true. if i had to explain it myself, i'd say it's about two guys getting whisked away from their seemingly mundane lives into a postmodern hellscape where their fates are suddenly controlled by an incomprehensible, shifting metaphor, Helsinki's sudden real-life legal intrusion manifesting as a narrative one in the fiction. this is the basis for the drama, but also for the comedy, and particularly how they intersect: many of the jokes serve to undercut the coherency of the storyworld to cruelly underline the absurd horrors the characters are now facing.
whether this works or is fun to read is up to every reader to decide, of course. i guess it's an easy text to read "wrong" in the sense that there's a very specific way it demands you engage with it. i'm honestly somewhat surprised that so much of the reader response so far feels like people get my literary intentions!
anyway, as a result, i don't really have much to say to most of your comments. as for some specific ones i can try to elaborate on:
> She says things that are inconsistent with her character (someone posh saying balancussy?).
the word choice is an attempt to translate the specific pun from the original script, which i felt was important enough to not change into some other kind of joke. i honestly dislike the final result more for being anachronistic to 2006, and would gladly change it if anything better occurred to me.
in general, though, i think it's not too far from the character's voice, since Helsinki's whole point is the ambiguity of how much her "sophisticated city folk" thing is a role she plays and how much it's just what she's like (and what the difference would even be).
> the movie theatre scene felt more like you advertising your taste in media
well, i'd say the major references are pretty purposeful in their intertextual meanings. the whole scene being a homage to Kaurismäki's FALLEN LEAVES is a deliberate move to put the game in conversation with his filmography, particularly his brand of comedy, and it's worth noting that this is a reference the average Finnish reader is expected to probably get. as for SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY, the film the characters watch, the countryside/city dualism in that one is relevant in a fairly obvious way.
(even in more general terms, the soap opera the guys watch vs. Helsinki's preferred arthouse cinema is pretty central to how the text constructs the positions the characters represent and returns in a very big way later on. honestly, i worried the first date was too load-bearing since it had so much important material compared to the other two.)
> The third date didn't even have an outcome, but had Dom propose Sipoo's plan on behalf of Sipoo?
yeah. just pointing out that this is one of those places where you really don't want to over/underthink things – the rift arising between Dom and Sipoo in the story dramatizes the internal tensions in Sipoo's local politics resulting from how those two guys mishandled the private negotiations with Helsinki
> Is the Vanta panda joke a commentary on the region? We barely interact with Vanta throughout the work. What it is trying to say with that absurdist joke?
it's a specific reference i won't bother going into here, but more importantly, Vantaa is kind of just a guy who shows up, gladly hands Helsinki the key to her scheme (the Wedge of Vesterkulla) with no clear motive of his own, and refuses to elaborate. this is more or less how it went down in real life, too.
> I did like the presentation of the map screens, and the use of transitions, although the font you used made Sipoo look liked SIP(two number zeros). Skinny O's become 0's.
true, though you'll have to send this feedback to whoever designed the road signs in Finland! (what i'm using is someone's CC0-licensed reconstruction of the font, but it's very close to the real thing.) i guess there is no risk of confusion in practice, since place names don't tend to have numbers in them.