The ASCII art is amazing! What tools did you use to generate it?
The gameplay wasn't quite my taste. It had some interesting ideas, but didn't really wow me. It's probably more of a niche game.
The game inside the game seemed a bit random, although maybe there was some relation to the story that I didn't see. Well, it crashed my game, so I will probably not find out:
It happened during the upgrade shop screen. I bought one upgrade for 2 coins and another for 0. Then I tried the third one for 3 coins, even though I didn't have any more coins. It seemed like the only option left to advance the screen was picking the last upgrade. That's when that screen popped up. I tried pressing buttons for a little while, since part of me expected it to be part of the game, but nothing worked...so I'm pretty sure it's just a regular crash.
But aside from the bug, I'm sure there are a lot people who would love this kind of game. Good luck and have fun with the further development!