Thank you for your kind words! (And the typo alert--fixed!) For whatever it's worth, I was very interested in avoiding straight answers to things in this game, and was very conscious about the fact that I could only expect players to probably read 25-60% of the text in the game.
I initially was going to have the sign next to the koi pond say "Don't punch the koi" but found it a bit too tonally jarring, perhaps, for the uninitiated. Maybe I should've gone with my first instinct though.
SUPER SPOILER: This game is set in the same world as Koi Puncher MMXVIII, and there are several other textual and visual references to that fact.