I don't think it's harsh to say it's unplayable, it was designed that way.
I did want some graphics in the game but being a programmer with limited time I had make do with just text.
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Yeah, that's fair. It was a bit harsh. I had been up for 52 hours at that point, so I might have been a bit grumpy, sorry about that.
Let me do a better, more coherent feedback:
I do think it would be more fun if the main things that your character can see were all in whatever your chosen language is, and things that people say or things that you read (like) signs were in random languages. That way you still have the element of "What is going on?" but you can also still progress.
As it stands, I open the program and get Japanese Kanji characters and nothing else. Am I in a menu? Am I in the game? I see buttons on the bottom, but I have no idea what is going on, so I am essentially hitting them randomly, which is not fun.
That being said, you made a text-based role playing game for a 48 hour game jam! I have MAD respect for that. I love the image you chose for uploading it, it is absolutely perfect. It called to me across 16 thousand other entries to have me try it.
Thank you for the second round of feedback.
Looking back I think my biggest regret was not having a menu system in place so the player knows when they are playing. The main reason why I missed this was because when I was making it, the game was all in English until the final bit so it never clicked with me that someone playing for the first time wouldn't know what to do.
I was going to go for a more understandable approach to the jam with an FPS where you couldn't choose when to reload but in the end I decided that this jam needed a completely out there game that is borderline impossible to play.
While I was planning to abandon the game after the jam your comment has really made me consider going back to it after a couple of weeks and seeing what can really be done with a game without traditional feedback.