What a fun game! I love the pokemon/stardew character vibe, just like what I was going for in my game. I also understand the MASSIVE amount of work that had to go into this game.
For starters, the textures. Each character had their own unique sprites, so did each fish, each tile, etc. Holy crap!
Secondly, the bridges and hill-climing ramps. That's not easy to code, I actually excluded them in my game because they would have taken too long to make and I just didn't have the time.
Thirdly, the character interactions. I don't know how, but you managed to have characters with adaptable responses and events. Nice job! I have something similar in my game where a character's architecture allows them to to either talk, question, push back, finish conversation, or update status while talking. I felt that your game did theis excelently.
Now, there was one thing that troubled me. For whatever reason, after unlocking the second bridge (Roach man) I could no longer collect fish, they went right through me and I had to stop my run there (probably a collision system error). Other than that, not much critique except that the controlsjust needed to be explained to the player (like LMB to use fishing rod). This is not meant to be a polished game anyways, just a prototype.
I really hope you make it into the top three. Good Luck!