Hey first off, I want to thank you for playing the game! It sounds like you are rating alot of entries to that is super nice of you!
I want to say that your critique is perfectly valid but I wanted to provide some thoughts on it. For starters, the nature of this game being a visual novel inherently makes it pretty hard to play in a short burst for rating. Our goal was to make a funny pipe x flappy bird dating sim and we narrowed in on just that. We thought the funny interpretation of the theme makes it a pretty solid and unique entry to most despite not having a mechanic integrated in the theme. I feel there is a myriad of ways that a theme can be interpretated that people tend to miss and just go for a mechanic :[
As for the pacing it’s sad to hear that you did not go for the less costly options. We didn’t want to waste your time. That’s why the flappy bird game has wider pipes and we always have a low option for people to continue to progress. Some of those low cost options have some of my favorite dialogue in the game(404 route is super wholesome) i also feel that you maybr are missing the point that the more costly options are the more nervous options for Pipe-Kun/Chan to say which is why they are hard to do. Although I will agree with you that we should have changed the minigame a bit. We had plans for it and Concept art but we were getting crunched for time. It took 7+ hours of me staying up past midnight just to get 75% of the dialogue in. So our work was very tough at times.
I am still very thankful you played the game and I appreciate the review. I’m sorry that it started to slog after a bit as it was hard for us to test the story due to time. It may not seem like it but we were very much against the clock. Again thank you for playing! And thank you for rating the jam entries! We had a vision for the game and I am so happy my me and my team was able to deliver on it in such a short time frame :]