this game is both super cool and somewhat frustrating. i think my perspective on it as a non-hypno-kinkster is perhaps interesting, and i played it for quite a while so i have a bit i want to say.
first of all: wow. the audio here is so excellent. and one thing i want to make very clear, so that what i'm about to say makes sense: i really, really hate this Iana character. like, i truly find them menacing and evil, and i so desperately wish to get the hell out of there. i don't know if that's necessarily the intended reading, but i am very much not here to be hypnotized... i am here to escape. and the writing really does a good job at making this place feel scary.
and so the way that this cheerful melody plays whenever we get near Iana. it's so cool. this melody that seems happy and delightful takes on a truly menacing tone and creeps me out. and this is just really awesome. it's something that i have never really seen before, the way the writing just makes me feel so freaked out that it literally impacts the emotional quality of the music in this way.
the audio is really effective in other ways too. for example, the first ending i did was just the immediate submissive one, and the way the SNAP sounds go is just really neat. the rest of the audio work is also great, the way it communicates hypnosis or ambience or whatever. similarly, the sparing use of hypnosis visuals is pretty effective, at least for the first couple rooms where you run into them. you can really feel the bright spiral bearing down on your vision when it's one of the only images you see in the novel.
however, as a non-hypno-kinkster, there are also some stumbling blocks for me. for one, i really was tryharding after my initial immediate-sub ending. the second ending i got was one involving me attempting to hypnotize Iana but failing. and i couldn't tell if i still had some chance of getting somewhere, and it took the novel a very very long time to confirm whether i won or lost. i remember at some point there was talk of like, a fire glove (?) or something, but i couldn't really tell what the game was even talking about at that point, and that plot thread didn't seem to go anywhere. i admit i may have been skimming though. but what was unfortunate is by the time i confirmed it was definitely a bad ending, i could not actually rewind all the way to where i was before. thankfully i had saved shortly before then so i was able to get my progress back pretty quickly, but had i not saved i might have had to quit there.
the willpower system seems neat but ultimately felt kind of silly as it mostly meant going back to the bathroom whenever possible. i mean, to actually successfully hypnotize the cat all i had to do was wrap around back to the bathroom, restock on willpower, and then re-do the same actions i had done before, which seemed kind of silly.
although, i will admit it was harder to find my way back to the bathroom when i hadn't yet hypnotized all the other heroes. there was a neat moment where i was trying to find my way back to restock, and i ran into one of the hypnotized heroes, and i had to try to hypnotize them back because it seemed like that was the only way back. and i just barely managed to do that with 10 willpower left, so that was a tense moment.
that said, i think the navigation was rather confusing while all the non-hypnotized characters are in the hallways... like you can't really tell if you're coming back to the same rooms or not. i mean, this is probably a good thing from a "your mind is hazy" perspective, but it does seem a bit strange that hypnotizing other people makes you a better navigator.
after seeing that the keycard itself was not enough to win, i put in quite a bit of time trying to go through everything else i had missed. there were a couple unmarked rooms i hadn't explored--one thing that confused me was, i thought the "unmarked room" next to the midnight office was the same as the "unmarked room" one step down the hallway from that (i thought that moving one step down the hallway just kind of shifted everything over by one--it took me a while to realize they were actually distinct rooms).
eventually i stumbled upon the safe, and i had absolutely no idea what the passcode might be. i'm pretty sure i had seen everything else besides a couple of the things that happen when you get hypnotized (whenever i saw myself kind of locked into a hypnosis loop i would just back out, when exploring the rest of the rooms). so, as far as i was concerned, the passcode was probably completely random. this is when i threw in the towel: i just looked at the HTML to see the passcode, and yeah, i have absolutely no idea where these values come from. turns out it didn't matter though--doesn't seem like anything in the safe will lead to a new ending.
i think i may have been tricked by the way the other endings were labeled "Bad Ending" -- i was definitely imagining there was a Good Ending somewhere that i just hadn't found yet. but at this point, i was pretty sure i had seen everything i could reasonably get to, so i decided to give up and start writing my feedback. from checking the comments, it seems like maybe there isn't actually a Good Ending. i guess that would have been nice to know earlier...? idk, i do think that saying "Bad Ending" sort of implicitly suggests there is a Good Ending to contrast with it, but that might just be a skill issue on my part.
anyway. that's basically what happened for me. the first half-hour or so of this game was really very cool, again with the menacing vibes and such. the last half-hour was just running in circles with the subdued cat in the hallway, so there was really no risk left (besides the other random ways to end up hypnotized, which i just didn't follow through with) and it became kind of boring.
i do think that the writing is really really good at portraying, say, an abuser, in Iana, at least if you're not here for the kink. just somebody who you really want to get away from at any costs, but where it's easier to just... not. for context, i have been in an abusive relationship before. and this game wasn't triggering for me, or anything, it was just really effective writing. and that in and of itself is kind of cool--i mean, maybe i'm just healing by now, but i also feel like the game just does a good job at making this scary without being like, so similar to real life as to be triggering. i think part of that might actually be the focus on hypnosis--at least from my understanding, hypnosis simply does not work like this irl. and so the idea that someone has control over you due to hypnosis feels comparatively safe (as opposed to say, having control over you through the threat of violence)--because it simply isn't something that can actually happen.
in summary, i don't know if i have ever played a visual novel as good at making me feel stuff. so, good job! but i was not turned on. lol