Always appreciate detailed responses like these :)
Just to follow up on a couple things here, first, you absolutely should feel satisfied with the story you wrote - I definitely don't want to undersell how much adding all those branching dialogue paths increases the degree of difficulty to get this done on jam deadlines (especially compared to your May Wolf entry, which was fully kinetic if I recall correctly) and most of this was still very effective.
For the "internet" side of things, I think you were actually most of the way there, it was just the contents of Alan's post-Hyraxoid reveal outburst that seemed to be still overly dickish compared to where we were in the conversation at that point that really muddied it for me. I think maybe just toning down that scene a bit and having Alan make a "you're not who I thought Hyraxoid would be" realization sooner would go a long way.
For what it's worth, when I was originally writing the comment, I actually thought the beach scene did switch out of pixel-style graphics and it was only when I went back to double check that I realized they were still there, so either consciously or unconsciously I think what you were going for still worked.