Ah the scrolling changes everything! I was able to make much more progress now.
I think the silence option is implied to be the bad one, maybe if it was just "stay silent" and the timer would auto select it that would be clearer
It's very challenging to progress as picking a letter might bite you in the butt later. It was probably very hard to design this one!
Glad it helps! As someone who uses renpy a lot I kind of thought it was well known but I have to stop assuming people know the arbitrary tools I use, I'll probably mention it on the game's page aswell to help out others who might get stuck!
Silence is neither good nor bad, a bit like most things in life. Especially since the main character themselves struggles with silence it might be percieved as a more negative option. It is hinted at (a tiny bit) in the description when it mentions you'll need patience but to a lot of people letting the timer run out might feel a bit counterintuitive at points. In a way, that's also what the protagonist is feeling, that they "have to keep talking".
The hardest part for developing this was mostly making sure each path is accessible (although letting the timer run out can fix a lot of softlocks as a happy little coicidence.) and adding dialogue for when the timer runs out since it got very spaghetti-coded very fast. But those are problems for future me.
