Cool creation that gave off fun N64 / PS1 era feels.
I'm sorry to hear you had so much trouble using Unreal. During the game jam I upgraded from a GTX980 to a RTX3060 and Unreal started crashing. I ended up having to add two 32bit DWORD entries to the registry(TdrDelay = 60 and TdrDdiDelay = 60) at Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers as described in the "How to Resolve TDR Events" section of this post: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/dealing-with-a-gpu-c... Those entries give the GPU more time to respond and therefore stop the engine crashing. I hope that's helpful if you ever decide to give Unreal another try; I had a lot of fun learning the engine once the crashing was gone and I highly recommend it.
In any case, I loved your entry and I was especially fond of the premise. You implemented the theme well and pulled off a solid entry to the jam. Well done! I look forward to seeing more of what you make in the future!