Different people experience different levels of response to hypnotic suggestion. Getting hypnotized is a skill that can improve with practice, but there’s wide variance in baseline experiences. Different “kinds” of suggestion work in different ways – some people experience vivid hallucination very easily (and would feel the sun and the waves quite directly!) while others might be more susceptible to identity-play, amnesia effects, etc.
Clinical hypnotherapy research suggests that it is possible to induce an REM state in someone hypnotized with their eyes closed. But I’m not going to get that when the eyes are busy reading text! Vivid, dreamlike sensory hallucination is definitely possible under hypnosis for some folks, but I’ve only experienced it myself on a couple of occasions, and never with a prerecorded file of any sort, only in a live session when I was unusually responsive and my friend hypnotizing me was especially on point. I typically get effects much closer to vivid daydreaming, from a sensory perspective. Bending my motivations, desires, behavior, cognition, and memory is all easier – but it’s taken a while to get to that level of experiential susceptibility. Behavior is the easiest thing to elicit but folks rarely subjectively “feel” particularly hypnotized – one technique that I used but needed to lean into more is that of using behavioral suggestions to produce something that a subject will recognize more directly as an altered state; that’s what the bit about “you can’t look away when you try, which you should do” was about.
“Zoned out” is a light trance state. People used to focused work (software engineering, including game dev, is a notable example) are typically familiar enough with a state of focus that it takes a bit more work to persuade them that they’re hypnotized, since “focus” and “hypnosis” are such closely related states that hypnosis doesn’t feel unfamiliar enough. I tried to lean into avolition – acting without experiencing intent to do so – but that’s hard to emphasize in a short session, since the subjective experience is of just going along with the suggestions. I can do more with it directly. It’s hard to convert skills I’ve built around noticing how someone is reacting to being hypnotized and using that into a “prerecorded” context like this. Which is pretty common, which goes back to why prerecorded things usually work poorly for less-experienced subjects. My ambition with this was to see if I could make it more participatory in ways that would help produce stronger effects for less-experienced subjects, as well as use hypnotic techniques not typically attempted in a text form, but overall I think I got a pretty “normal” level of response out of folks, reading the comments here.
Maybe I should still be pretty satisfied with that – I got a “normal” level of response out of folks from my first hypnosis software, which I did in Pico-8 (not known for its suitability for this use), in a shorter form with a non-traditional induction. I’d like to do more, and I already have ideas for what a rewritten script could do better – and I do plan to write an alternate version with a totally new script, aimed at slightly different kinks, pushing harder into them to an extent I wouldn’t put in a game jam because it’d be more than the other developers were signing up for when agreeing to rate games. (Which is part of why this was on the lower-key end.)
It’s reasonable to be vigiliant about whether a hypnotic thing is appropriate for you – “check out the file first without going into trance” is common advice in the hypnokink community. That internal hypervigilance can definitely be headache-inducing – I’ve been there – and I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to have a hard time handing over that level of trust to, in this case, a computer program written by a complete stranger. Vacation is roughly the same every time – word spawning in the arcade stages is partially randomized, but the other text is constant. (The arcade stage text is structured to be suggestive in ways that might not be apparent at first, so it is suggestive, but its themes are constant.) You can also open up the source (vacation.p8) to review the script, including the word lists, in its entirety. But that only does so much; I guess what I’m saying with this long rambling comment is that I think you’re having a very normal experience for any prerecorded Hypnosis Thing. My writing in the game about how vivid the experience would be is, in a word, optimistic – if I don’t try for it I’ll never push anyone’s experience that far, but (like a lot of hypnotic suggestion) it is very exaggerated relative to a reasonable expectation.