Hey thanks for trying it out, glad you enjoyed it!
Yeah the hints definitely need re-working, the reason they are so blunt and numerous is that when I did two rounds of playtesting before people got stuck on what I thought were pretty trivial things. Basically I've been attempting to idiot-proof on a tight deadline. In the longer demo I have planned, these hints would be spread out a lot more and the player would have more space to experiment.
But reducing the text load into visuals is a nice idea, and one I hope to implement. The inventory screen is an especially bad offender in the text-overload in my opinion, but I'd be happy to hear of any other specific examples.
By environmental hints do you mean the ability to examine objects or just the blatant hinting like sticky note on the wall? Stuff like the note I don't intend to keep, but was put in to make sure people used the phone to scan the QR code. It breaks the challenge entirely, but it does make it a certainty that people use the scanning mechanic and can provide some feedback on it.
The game box is an easter egg, its for the first game I ever uploaded to itch for the "So Bad It's Good" game jam.
Happy to hear you liked the interactivity and atmosphere, I'm trying to get a real immersive feel with this project, so hopefully that'll be achieved once I get the UI clutter toned down. This is also the first time anybody tried the new physics interaction, so it's nice to know the last month wasn't wasted lol.
And I will keep going with this because if I don't, then I fail my university course and can't graduate this year lmao.