I was able to get the normal ending, mostly thanks to discovering and thoroughly exploiting a bug that allowed me to leave home and go work another shift after returning from the first. Gaming or cooking after arriving removes the "it's night, can't go back out" message and lets you return to the field to hustle further. This let me rack up multiple workdays without advancing the calendar. There might have been some smaller bugs too - I think the news alerts didn't always line up with actual price hikes - but I didn't pay very close attention for them.
I still got a bunch of game overs and ended the game at 30 hp, with only one day to spare after collecting the rent. So the bug might not be a total game-breaker, especially considering how risky it is to catch the plague or something just after heading out - I only used it if I was still in mostly-good condition. It could be more exploitable - I might not have hustled hard enough while the hustling was good significantly less dangerous in the early game. I might also just have bad plague RNG.
I don't fuck around with 50/50 odds for escaping unless I have to, so I fought most encounters and ended the game at level 6. That said, if I was in over my head, Coughing Fit never seemed like a better option than just trying my luck escaping. I found hunger the easiest resource to manage, so I made a lot of complementary use of the single-attack move that stresses you out and the move that burns stress but makes you hungry.
I suspect there'll be plenty of media that sets out to capture the fear and isolation and historical impact of the pandemic once it's in any sense "behind us", but I think this game does a good job at specifically emphasizing the more mundane lose-lose-lose situations people face every day.
It's a very angrily-written short story of a survival horror RPG, in a good way. I like that it uses a straightforward turn-based RPG format but denies the agency or power that would normally grant. You just have a level 6 capacity to cope with this part of the collapse of an individualistic society.
I liked the glitch effects and vaguely nauseous graphical style. Some of it ran like shit on my laptop which is probably in-theme. in conclusion fuck them biiiiirds