Once again, thank you for your honest thoughts! Haha well this uses NVL-style instead of the usual ADV-style (where text bar is at the bottom), the buttons are still in the exact same place at the bottom and I never mess with any of the keyboard commands, so rest assured anytime I use Ren'Py the ESC key will not break anything, but I do understand your hesitation at first. Note you can always press the *Skip* button (also accessible from the Settings menu) to skip seen text to speed through stuff so you don't have to go click happy.
I do agree that this game being bad or good will be clearly subjective. Some people who had played it were having fun with the RNG, seeing if their luck would play out to get them to an ending, and some were frustrated like yourself. I had a friend though who's RNG luck was ridiculous and didn't even reach a game over until her third playthrough lol. So yeah, this game is definitely a 50/50 by far, you either love it or you hate it, one or the other. Mm, probably having the RNG lead to other sorts of endings aside from game over screens during the trials would've been a good idea, duly noted for next time!
Haha hilariously enough, this game is actually much shorter than my previous SBIG entries, especially shorter than Crystal Captor which took on average 1 hour to an hour and a half to finish, but yes, perhaps I should've done a more prototype on this particular concept but honestly on my end I felt like it was a bit too short whilst you feel it was a bit too long, so I think the length is also pretty subjective.
Anyway, thank you for your honest feedback, even if it is more on the very critical side--I'll be taking a few of your suggestions into consideration for next time! I also think it may help i next year I just outline a story ahead of time instead of hinging the last minute on a modifier. CC ended up the way it did because I purely went wild without a modifier stopping me (since it was the pre-modifier age), and RCRV I already had its concept in mind and worked with the modifier into the story. Next time I think I will outline what I really wanna do, and if the modifier works for the story, great, if not I could implement it somehow as a minor side thing or passing mention but not make it a focused plot point. I will admit I had been suffering writer's block the past few weeks, so that may also be why this game ended up the way it did, but it also really helped me to unclog my brain and get the muse flowing again, so if one thing positive came from this, it's that haha.