Thank you — genuinely. Playing all the way through and then writing this out is a real gift, and I want to address each of your points properly.
The prestige bug. I shipped a fix for this today (v2026-05-25c). The actual root cause turned out to be deeper than I first thought: when the "begin again" button cleared the save and tried to navigate to a fresh URL, the browser's beforeunload / pagehide events were silently firing one last saveState() and re-writing the Phase VII state back into storage right before the page reloaded. So the save was being overwritten one frame before it was used. The "everything still completed, activities already imprinted in the body" symptom you described was the exact fingerprint of that race — the legacy reward applied (separate storage), but the run state was never actually cleared. It's properly fixed now, and the second-reward path (all activities pre-unlocked from the start) does what it says.
Mobile. A couple of those are patched too:
- The disappearing narrations — some lines in Phase VII were floating but never written to the log, so they were lost when they faded. They persist properly now.
- The walk button hit area — added defensive layering so it should stay tappable across its full surface, not just the edge that extended past the log.
- The "narrative text overlapping the log" one I couldn't fully reproduce on my end, but the fixes around layering may have improved it as a side effect. If you ever happen back and it's still off, I'd love to hear.
The pacing point about secondary currencies. This one is really sticking with me. You named the exact thing that has been bothering me too — once you understand the formula, mid-to-late phases collapse into "boost insight, sweep the items." The secondary-currency idea (later phases producing their own currency that interlocks with insights) is a clean way to force the player to actually live inside each phase instead of zooming through it. I'm going to sit with this rather than rush a change, because as you said the balance is delicate — too slow kills it too — but you've given me the most useful piece of design feedback I've gotten on this game so far. I owe you for that.
Thank you again for sticking with it to the end, and for putting this much care into the writeup. It made every fix easy to track down, and the design notes are going to shape how I think about the next phases. Truly grateful.