Thank you for your thought-out feedback, I hope to clear up any frustrations you may have with our development.
We were still working on it during all those months where we didn't push out a build. Since 2019 we have made multiple staff adjustments, the main story had been written out by a former writer and we had to do rewrites and fixed many of the worries you have.
I, Lone Wanderer, had joined the team in 2018 and always intended the game to delve into an angle of existential and psychological horror for which we had rewritten the entire game to fit our new standards.
It should hopefully become more clear by the time we get into the next chapter. This first chapter (which will be days 1 - 10) serves as a way to build the world, the characters, so that we can work with all of them in the segments that come up.
In order for the themes of the game to work, you also need to know who the people and environment around you are. This is why we are having routes where you can hang out with people. We do care about the identity crisis that Yarin would face in this situation, for which we also did create and push out new content in 0.3.9. We have added several more subtle hints at the main character experiencing a subdued but everpresent anxiety in most situations.
We are also almost finished with the amount of dates we want to add to the first chapter at least. We only have a few dates remaining before we move on to different types of content.
Regarding the option to spend time alone: We did also want to add an option in case one is not interested in hanging out with the other characters. We are also planning to add several short scenes to it, where Nyrok might find ways to occupy himself.
We do appreciate that you have been following our game project for this long, and if you feel like checking out our future content at your own pace, we will still be here.