There is an options.ini in the game folder, and a hungrymermaidcruise.ini in appdata/local for me. Are you saying the hungrymermaidcruise.ini generates in the game folder for you? :o
Yep, there's a hungrymermaidcruise.ini file in the game folder for me! If I rename it to force the game to generate a new one it resets my save, so it seems to be reading from there too. I am using the previous release where I had to delete README.txt, if that matters, but I haven't had any problems saving and loading, so I'm completely fine with just copying the save into whatever folder it needs to be in for any future releases.