Pleasantly surprised by how much I liked this one! I personally think it gets the story across pretty effectively, it's a creative take on the theme (I'd only use the word 'blackout' in one of those instances, but it's not that much of a reach tbh,) and though I'll admit that Story Mode isn't the most fun, Arcade Mode definitely picks up the pace and takes advantage of the mechanics you have. The fish is seriously floaty, sure, but taking advantage of the character controller and thusly only moving clockwise or counterclockwise without daring to let go is actually quite a lot of fun. I got 126. I am far worse at the Fisherman Perspective but I also can't give it a lot of time before I go to work today--I can't say I didn't get into it! I only had one bug, that being in Story Fisherman, where I had 2k to my name and bought an upgrade that cost 1k, it upgraded it twice instead of once and took all my money. Small bug in the grand scheme of things but a bug still.
If the game has any weak spot, it's the visuals. The colors are all fine and well, I don't really mind if the spritework's rough, but what I mean more is that--as a non-artist--you do not necessarily have to limit yourself to flat colors and paint buckets. Have some fun with gradients! I get that that'd be harder to pull off in the ocean (where the change from flat color to flat color matters a lot, and you've telegraphed that very well) but it's certainly manageable. You could also have a few bubbles in the background, or even little particles, or much tinier fish just kinda going about their business. That's all flavor and flair I suppose, but for Arcade Mode (I'm not sure it would fit the story too much) it would be very nice to have a visual on where the nearby fishes or even nearest fish is when they aren't on screen, since wandering around a single-color screen holding left or right and making sure I'm not secretly at an invisible wall is frustrating when I have a timer over my head. It's recoverable but it's put me in a bad spot every time I tried.
if I can say something less about the game: I would be more open to the criticism you're receiving from the people who've missed the story in one way or another or didn't try arcade mode. I don't think you have a bad attitude whatsoever--I get the need to defend your work, especially if the person on your tail hasn't seen everything you put into it, but one of the first things I learned as an adult/college student is that you won't always be there to defend your work. Sometimes your work will be seen, and you'll be given an unexpectedly low grade or have the bulk of your game passed up on without you personally being able to make the player see your perspective. Think of it less as, "this player missed a thing!" and more as "how did this player miss this thing?" or perhaps "why would this player assume anything except my vision?" That is one the most difficult parts of game development, to the point where you could readily look at the comments of my own game and call me a blazing hypocrite for letting people know that the game is hard because there's a bug. I think there's a material difference between that (plus you stating that letting people cheese the story fish perspective was intentional, that feels incredibly allowed to me) and disagreeing with people missing the story but I have to go to work in like two minutes and can't think much more on that.
To be clear though, above all else, I think you did a very good job with this and I'm excited to see what games and stories you have in store going forward :)