Though I must confess that this largely didn't work for me, I think it was going to be a hard sell regardless; I find it to be rich in the kind of bordering-on-overwrought sentimentality & didacticism that most often turns me off.
To be more precise, I think the script has a habit of resisting ambiguity, complexity, and subtlety, pushing as hard as it can on whatever emotion it wants to convey, sometimes even to contradictory ends. The protagonist arrives at the hospital conveniently in time to witness the subsequent deaths of his baby sister and mother, but later has a mystifying guilt nightmare about having supposedly abandoned them, which feels like it would maybe make more sense in a version of the story where he tragically misses the entire thing. There's a running theme with Ransom being prone to violent impulses, but his outbursts only ever target people who might as well as be marked as ontologically evil, and as such, it barely feels like anything worthwhile is said about the thorny intersection of violence, masculinity, justice, and retribution. (And, sorry, but it's kind of wild to me that the game turns it into a lesson of "If you're willing to show your heart, you will find yourself capable of wonderful things.")
But even outside of those cases, it's all just a lot. Almost every social situation is about the protagonist's insecurity and awkwardness; the way nature is described always seems to stress its beauty; the first encounter with the love interest is initiated with the narration noting "I can't explain it, but I feel like something's... pulling me towards him." A single detail that struck out to me as very telling is the dad's shitty replacement Thanksgiving dinner pizza being specifically described as "stale" and "disgusting" – is the situation not disappointing enough by itself? Does the pizza also have to bad? To me, all this stuff makes it harder, not easier, to arrive at the emotional response the game seems to be expecting.
That being said, I found a lot of the prose to be pretty good. The conversational, casual first-person narrator works well, and I think the descriptions avoid ever getting so flowery that they would feel out of place with it. It does make it easy to notice how much the author's own voice bleeds into how the characters speak – there's a lot of "huh" and "how about that" – which I think represents a possible area of improvement. Editing-wise, the writing is impressively clean for a game jam project without an external editor, though the narrowness of the vocabulary leads into some gratuitous repetition. As an example, the word "story" occurs in literally every paragraph of the opening narration, sometimes even multiple times.
Visually, good job with the presentation; the UI is basic but functional, and there's some sharp typography in the logo design and the credits. I'm not sure how much this has to do with the art being simply unfinished, but a weakness that stands out is many characters having similar faces, poses, and angles – all in all, it doesn't feel like the sprite art conveys much individuality. Also, in a game about photography, I think it's maybe a bit of a shame that the filter for the backgrounds is so overpowering.
In total, I do think I maybe enjoyed this more than the last thing by the creator that I read, or at least thought that my problems had more to do with personal taste than craft this time. I'm sure this will find its fans, and I wish the author good luck with future projects!