that means a lot coming from you dude! since your game is pretty much an aesthetic maximum haha. and damn, the end of the game does actually close the game for you automatically, but there should be other visual aspects after you go into windowed mode. it looks a little bit like the game crashes after you go into the monitor, but the window you're left with should have other things going on in it. i'm assuming you waited a little bit while the music was going? if you can hear the sounds, you should be able to hear the music track conclude before it permanently closes itself. after about 3 seconds of the empty window you should see something happen.
and yeah the textboxes not being on input really made me cringe at myself, but i added the entire story sequence intro on the last couple days and i didn't have enough time to make it input-based. i figured i didn't want to troubleshoot it this late into the game, so i opted for timed textboxes. in between my frantic development and that i had to rewatch the intro cinematic over and over, i might have been a little too stingy with the amount of time i allotted the players :p i was kicking myself for not putting a coefficient in front of the timers for quick tweaking of how long everyone got. i might've slapped on like 1.25 to 1.5 times more wait time in between each textbox.
also funny story about the pop-in for the textboxes--obviously Teleco's was meant to look like it's coming out of glowy TV static, but the Channeler's text was based on the black-barred yellow Helvetica font that they use to subtitle old undubbed foreign films here. so i wanted the Channeler to speak one word at a time with the text being pushed up and disappearing with each new line, so further emphasize the CRT/VHS era aesthetic. the left on read dev works in movies and actually was really excited to see that i did that, and we had a good laugh over it. :'] but i didn't have enough time to figure that out either, so it uses the same pop-in as Teleco's.
and yeahhhhh lmao, i know i designed the starting area a little messily. i was telling someone earlier about how i think the visual design of the starting island is also confused by the vertical columnal arrangement of CRTs. since you were supposed to make one complete circuit before having your signal pass, i felt bad putting the splitter entrance and exit there, since you wouldn't know what to do with them and they're much more noticeable than the tile path leading to the first "gaomono" creature.
you can move with the soundwaves to go faster in any direction, but i kind of mixed in advanced and casual approaches so that the game could be completed in 10 minutes by someone who isn't familiar with it, but could be completed much faster by someone who was more familiar with it. like the momentum physics were meant for being able to corner faster and make precise approaches towards the gaomono. cranking to maximum and simply waiting will get you through everything else until the end, but if you control your volume as you go you can bypass everything quickly. in fact, if the gaomono are muted, you can actually bounce off them since their audio waves don't lock you in place, so they can kind of boost you to make you go faster. in an earlier iteration, the first splitter is approached by a gaomono that's locked in place if you keep the volume high, but it stressed people out and i thought it would prolong the challenge too much, so i opted to keep it out. but luckily everyone seems to figure out that you have to modulate the volume slowly for the last one.
and oh no, i don't think i've seen anyone get stuck like you describe but i can imagine exactly how that happened. damn. yeah that's an oversight then haha.
thank you for your feedback! it's a damn shame you couldn't see the ending, because i think it really caps it off in a memorable way, but i'm glad that you spent the time on it and i hope you'll be around for when we take it even further. :]