Positives first: I think the art is generally lovely, and there are enough illustrations to make up for the story not involving any characters who would get sprites. Though it's obviously not presented as a joke here, making the jam-obligatory deer be a wild animal the protagonist hunts and kills is a very creative (and slightly funny!) decision, excellent out-of-the-box thinking.
As for the writing, which is why this didn't really work for me at all... there's no nice way to phrase this, but it came off as pretty ChatGPT-core to me. I'm not saying you used it, but I think the prose has some hallmarks of AI-generated/assisted text that make it stylistically unappealing and ultimately hard to connect with on an emotional level.
First of all, it's very heavy with clunky metaphors ("a wish to be enveloped by the last of what I believe to be salvation") that often get in the way of conveying the intended mood. Consider this line, for instance: "My chest tightens — a hard, relentless squeeze that steals the breath from my lungs." The entire part after the em dash is just ornamentation that actually takes away from the concrete physical reality of the bodily function being described; sometimes less is more. The story tries to go for vulnerability, but it doesn't work when every description is so heightened. Making things even worse is that the protagonist is a child – I just can't fathom choosing this super-purple style when narrating the story in 1st person from his perspective.
Also, even though the imagery strains hard to be poetic and detailed, the writing is rhythmically weak and often leans on simple, repetitive sentence structures. The recurring AI-esque "something – flowery elaboration" lines in particular are very annoying. Mechanical errors are rare (in the story; the About screen has a double typo in "drem" and "sruvive"), but there are inconsistencies with tense and punctuation (em dashes are sometimes surrounded by spaces and sometimes not). All in all, I get that the AI comparison is pretty inflammatory, but I just don't have any other way to explain why I didn't enjoy the writing at all.