Wow, I'm so happy you replied. I didn't even know if you'd still be able to see this lone comment left on a three year old game. I might've come off as a bit more frustrated in the comment than I really was. I definitely didn't find the experience of the game frustrating as a whole, if I did I wouldn't have wanted to dig into it at all. The frustration mainly came from not knowing if there WAS anything more to dig into, and your reply answered more or less every single question I had, so thank you very much!
I completely misinterpreted the green/orange dynamic. I think I had NPCs of the same colour read the same note, but then when I died I had the other colour read another note and my understanding of the symbols didn't line up. That's why I thought it randomized on every single death, which would've made it almost impossible to piece together the entire thing. Knowing that it's persistent makes the ghost much less frustrating, since you'd still be making some headway repeating the lives over and over. Though like you said, a change to the death animation would've been welcome.
It sounds like an interesting idea to have an in-game notebook to make progression easier, but I agree that it probably doesn't fit the tone of the game. Obviously I don't know the full intent behind everything you put into the game, but I very much like the minimalism and weirdness, and that there is no direct obvious goal or objective for you to do. I just tend to be a completionist by nature, so when I latched on to the symbols I was excited more in the sense of figuring out an obscure secret that most people might've missed, rather than thinking that it was the purpose of the game. It's always interesting to me to find depth in things where most people might just glance over it and move on after five minutes, and this game hit those buttons.
With all the information you gave me, and knowing now that there IS a way to progressively learn to understand the symbols, I think I might revisit the game and try to finish the list this weekend. I haven't gone through all the Procjam games from this year yet, but this one was definitely one of the ones that stuck with me and interested me the most. I'd certainly be interested in playing more games from you in the future, even if you don't decide to revisit this one.
Thank you so much!