Original interpretation, I also caught onto your game. To my shame, even though I once studied to be a psychologist, I need a hint for the first fish)
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Glad you appreciated it. There's no shame in needing hints for the fish — I struggled with them myself (it's a balance issue: the mechanics are non-standard, so the usual levers for adjusting difficulty are simply absent). Claude himself is a classic case of professional burnout. (He's a clownfish — what could be more fitting?) The expectation was for the player to help Claude, at least temporarily, step out of his role. (Honestly, I don't have a specific algorithm in mind to achieve that result. You'll probably have to improvise as you go.)