Hi! Thank you for taking the time to write your views on the game. It's very much appreciated.
Maybe we can do things that are meant to help but end up harming Asterion in the long run.
To a certain extent the game does have that, and the effects can be quite profound. If you are too touchy during your first encounter with Asterion and suggest you give him a bath he won't take it well. If you botch the first encounter with Argos, later Asterion will have a panic attack and you can mismanage that. Argos' encounters all have ways in which they can be managed better or worse, and those choices will have repercussions on the next build that affect Asterion.
As for your point about the choice of treating Asterion cruelly or nicely, we are aware that a lot of players don't find that engaging (we actually have numbers on this thanks to the surveys we do). Still, our perspective on this focuses a lot on the story of Minotaur Hotel as a whole. I don't want to get into spoiler territory, but if the player treats Asterion badly they'll end in a special scenario (the "Ruthless Route") and Build 0.5 contains the ending for that. Once that piece of content is in the game, I hope, people will have more knowledge to understand what's the purpose and the themes here. In other words, the "cruel" choices themselves weren't meant to be compelling on their own — in truth what, we hope, will be compelling is the story as a whole, how the characters and events will change based on these decisions, so on.
Anyhow, despite going a bit on the ruthless content... You said your favorite moments were when the MC and Asterion, shall we say, connected and reached out to each other. We'll have a lot of those in the next build, so I hope you'll like it.