I noticed sometimes I hit the pause button on a conversation and the bar stops going down, but the text continues to progress at the time it would've if I hadn't hit pause.  This caused me to loose a game I was pretty far into because I hit pause and walked away for 10 minutes.  For now I recommend players close the game rather than rely on the pause.  Would be nice to have the option to disable the autoresponse timer though.  I love the game and appreciate the intended play style, but I could see people getting frustrated and giving up on the game due to something like this.

Hi Wolf! From the sounds of it, it's a side-effect of how the game was designed very early on. Basically at real time we can only really control the longer responses from skipping. If the time to respond was really short to begin with (If I remember it's about <20-30 seconds) , that means the scene has priority and will advance even if you close the game or pause it. We try our best to hint that some stuff like that may be coming up but unfortunately there's nothing we can do to make the timer pause button override this priority advance without rewriting a significant portion of the game code.

Thanks for your feedback in any case! 👏