Thank you for such detailed feedback and for being so engaged — let us try to respond.
From the start, our main goal for this jam was to combine 2D and 3D space. We found an interesting collaborator and wanted to merge that approach with our artist’s work, so we decided not to put everything on a single screen (as in the early sketches) because it didn’t match the original concept.
We also wanted the game to be as intuitive as possible. The characters speak an unintelligible language on purpose — we were trying to explore the theme of fears and show that understanding someone’s words isn’t always necessary. That’s why we initially avoided giving a straightforward text explanation (although later we still had to add one in the game description).
Early on, we modeled a version with automatic filling for fears and answers, but it made the game finish extremely quickly. So we moved that part to the player to increase engagement in the process.
Choosing a 10×10 grid was our way of embracing the jam theme “as a whole.” However, the larger number of cells also made balancing much harder.
And yes — that’s an absolutely fair point: we had very little time for testing (almost none, to be honest). Because of that, the “Tutorial/Onboarding” task on our to-do list had to be reduced to the basics, and we also forgot to add one NPC line that was supposed to mention the key under the doormat.
I think that if the visual direction is interesting on its own, the game could be reworked later — for example into a simulator or something with a similar structure.
The camera was the most painful part: in WebGL, the system cursor doesn’t get restored properly. I searched for solutions online, and the most reasonable approach would be to never release the cursor at all (or to redesign the controls / input system). But by the time I fully realized this, it was too late to refactor, so we had to leave it as it is.