the art is on point, the sound is effective, the design and delivery are done well.
it's a well performed piece and almost a perfect product.
on the critical side it is slightly leaning towards an overtly simplistic message.
the player is hit on the head with it, it could do with slight improvement in game design in order to strengthen the emotional experience and make the message more nuanced.
while the work part is brilliant, for it provides a slight sense of mastery in face of the mundane, as shown in the player's slight improvement from one run to the next or between days, this is too quickly substituted with a feeling of zero agency.
failure breaks should be slightly shorter, the keypress timing a little less forgiving and the rate of speed increase less steep,
so as to allow just a bit more room for mastery
this is playing with the player's emotion as it allows for a small success within a mundane and trivial task, which leans well into the message.
walking home and home chores need either a slight variation, adding a miniscule sense of discovery or some angle for mastery
the walk home is the most failing part of the game where the player is reduced into the audience of an uninteresting film. adding a button to press while the predetermined film is playing feels like the designer is mocking the player for playing, not like dealing with a routine. it deducts from the message.
even real life traffic jams, offer something.
either the pointless game of switching lanes with the false belief of state improvement or the timing game of releasing and reapplying the breaks or, at the very least, the act of people-watching in the adjacent cars.
The music alone is what saves the walking home part and adds some taste to it.
Last is the vacation itself,
the act of the "reward" turning into nothing but a tiny picture on the wall is shear genius. it provides an emotional "drop" of disappointment mixed with humor before returning to your tiny work-mastery drill.
But, having the vacation itself repeat with zero variance too quickly drains the emotional potential and humor out of it.
the gag runs dry as soon as you hit the second vec.
providing a very slight variance in the vacation "scene", and therefor variation in the picture collection on the wall, will allow the player to sustain the very tiny aspiration for his next vacation in the face the loop-like rat race, even if merely in order to "complete" or "collect" which are effective player drives.
these tiny increases in variance, mastery or maneuverability will go a long way in doubling down the potential emotional ride of this piece:
a dire contrast
between the tiny momentary incentives and rewards and the overarching meaninglessness of the meta-loop.
or put more simply, life.