Hey ambrolen! Thank you for the thoughtful answer!
Binksi is a fairly easy tool if you stick to its main functionalities, or if you know javascript. Otherwise, it's not the easiest hill to climb, especially in the span of a jam. So I think you made a good call.
The boots are involved in one of the features that I thought ink would make pretty easy to implement. Nevertheless, I ran out of time, so they remained as you encountered them. But the game's original, Blackout, exit stage had this fully implemented! So if you're interested to see what's the deal with them, you can get to the bottom of it here.