I tried to go into this blind, so I didn't play more than a couple minutes of the HPS1 demo and avoided any spoilers from there on out. With that experience, this was definitely the most complex oates RPG I've played so far. I bounced off the game initially because of the brutal combat, but I pushed through that and then I bounced off again when I started gaining access to more parts of the overworld and got completely lost. I almost quit when the toilet meat beat me. But then I went back and defeated it and everything sort of clicked? 

I didn't want to spoil anything in my comment, but I loved how the mystery developed. Dying the first time and ending up in the corporate dungeon and just realizing there are other locations out there and seeing the ex-union boss and oof all these things that were just... a different kind of horror.

No Delivery and Nobody's Home felt like they were exploring an individual's horror of I guess, being trapped in the machinations of a capitalist society. But as you wrote in the Museum, Sorry We're Open is a zoomed out picture that's trying to explore more about the whole ecosystem and the societal ails. And I think it succeeds really well at that! Playing as a manager was a super interesting choice - you are not the lowest on the food chain, you will get others killed, you are partly responsible. You don't shy away from this at all - the managers have blood on their hands, I fired someone and gave them shit severance, it was all there - but you also put down a lot of empathy for their position. The zombified bodies of the managers in their offices says a lot, and your conversations with different people put a lot of color in there as well.

And I guess that's the thing, there are so many small, deft touches all across the board that paint a very vivid picture: the choice of stores, the snippets of story in the text adventures, the employees' liabilities, the side quests, NPC conversations and secrets. The secret riot manifest. Everything builds on top of each other so well, you really did a great job there!

Gameplay-wise, you continue to innovate with the resource-based combat here. Especially early on when you don't have any money and can't use the few moves that do actual damage, it's super tense. I did think the enemy designs were a bit weaker here, but I also did spend a lot of the game trying to avoid fighting and then once I got back into it I had a lot of money and it got a bit easy. Once I had a reliable shipping associate, stocker and cashier on my team I was basically unstoppable, but I liked that because at that point I was way more invested in the rest of the overworld.

Anyway, apologies for the ramble. Just wanted to say that this exceeded all my expectations and I loved the game a lot. Thanks again for making it!