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Thanks for the informative writeup.

In response to your queries:

1. Coins, what for? A store is in the making. It will include accessories that alter gameplay as well as cosmetics. The game will also include an energy mechanic in the form of ammunition. There's too much to explain, but the long and short of it is that the jam version has no store as I wanted to nail the gameplay first.

2. Music too quiet: That's an issue of ducking. I've already addressed this post jam, but yeah, sfx are reducing the gain of the music mix excessively and abruptly as well.

3. Music too short: Agreed. Really a time constraint issue. For this jam I composed 2 songs, in essence, both with relatively few bars and instruments. As you descend down the mantles a different "style" of the same song plays, for a total of 9 individual arrangements. I thought this would be sufficient for a jam environment, however, I'm starting to think it may be enough for the final product as well. I think as long as the play loops are kept short, the repetition should not present itself as an issue, but that's hard to say. Adding more content to the compositions should not be an issue, in the end of the day.

4. Theme: I agree, but the more I think about it, the more I'm seeing a subtle yet stronger connection. I have yet to work out if this is delusion or not. :) Either way, it is my firm position that utilising a theme to the point of making a game deliberately less enjoyable, as many seem to have done during this event, is unacceptable. The most common other approach to the theme, when the game hasn't been damaged, is to make characters deceptive, or using some kind of extreme plot twist. In my estimation that's missing the theme, as it's about the game intrinsically lying. One more case is where some developer have opted for making the game itself into a character of sorts. While literal, I think this is a fairly good reading of the theme. Extremely rare are the cases in which the theme has in fact been embraced subtly and enjoyably, where the game truly is a lie in its mechanics. An example is https://charu12.itch.io/mindless-runner. So, in our case, our game's premise is a logical fallacy which our protagonist firmly believes in. Yet the game itself will never allow for anything to be proven one way or another due to its design. I suspect if we had added a piece of narrative (in the form of a cutscene, for instance), we may have scored higher on this metric. We opted against it due to it being a low priority. But, yes, despite my somewhat long reasoning here, I agree with your position on this to a large extent.

Thanks again for taking the time to play and review the game in a comprehensive way. I appreciate the effort that goes into doing such a thing.

Cheers.