Thank you for playing and for taking the time to leave such an amazing comment!
For the microwave scene, I totally understand your perspective. It was a big risk to force players to sit through it for a whole minute. I really wanted it to stand out for many reasons. For one, this was the only countdown scene in the entire game that started and ended without a hard cut away, which can be interpreted in many ways. Though ultimately, I understand this is a “game” medium first and foremost. The paper ball throwing interaction was a very late addition to try to balance this a little more, but I definitely could have done better.
I played a game called INDIKA shortly before the jam started, and there’s a scene near the beginning where you have to carry a bucket to a well, fill it up with water, carry it to a barrel the other side of the village, empty the water into the barrel, and repeat this 5 times, whilst walking painfully slowly. Only for the barrel to be emptied of all its water immediately after that scene was over. For some reason it was a really big inspiration (said no one, ever!) for the direction of this jam game. It communicated so much meta context to the overall theme and narrative of the game in a way that felt really bold, intentional and unique - a style of creative direction that I really wanted to explore myself!
For the shader graphics, I am unfamiliar with Unity, but in Unreal you can create Post Process materials that applies after the scene natively renders to create various bespoke looks very cheaply. For this it was getting the screen uvs and multiplying by a “fake resolution” which was 320x240 in this case, which just crunches it to look pixelated and stylised. It also leans into and compliments FXAA anti aliasing which is also very performant. You can also mask anything from these effects with custom depths which I tried to do for some things like the timers for better clarity.