I guess I failed to feed the creature in time and died. I went to restart and all the interaction prompts were still visible which made replaying very difficult.
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Hey James, thanks for trying. I definitely didn't consider how I'd reset everything on death until later in the jam, and while I tried, my solutions could only be half baked, leading to cases like that. I either should have made that a priority early on, or else it might have been better to just close the game--that way you'd have to re-open the game, so those artifacts from the previous session wouldn't linger and muck things up.
I appreciate you taking the time to leave a comment, even if I couldn't service a good experience for you.