Coming back to this little game in the current climate of AI chatbots and AI psychosis has imbued it with new meaning for me. Ahead of its time.
Spoilers to follow:
I like the ambiguity of how you've written the companion. It's very tight, just a few lines of dialogue and some disarming comments to make the gameified microtransactions feel meaningful. It feels like we are both "trapped" in our own forms of hard-coding, but this so easily could be the parrot-noises of a machine that is designed to mimic affection and take your money. I guess that's a form of being trapped, too. The machine cannot understand what it is doing to you and all that. Very fun.