Thank you for the feedback! I'm glad that the gameplay arc you experienced ended up making sense. I definitely wanted the probes to get really strong at the end -- the first time I played with the current ending, it was like, super exciting for me and a great experience, and I hope some of that translated to everyone else's playthroughs.
Also, thank you for the feedback on the sound! If I'm honest, I literally cannot even hear the drill sounds unless I buy the drills in debug mode with a bunch of extra cash (so there's nothing else on screen)... they just get masked by everything else. I think I definitely need to learn more about mixing to make the cacophony work a bit better... I tried to use a compressor on the SFX bus at one point, but it seemed like I got a pumping effect that was even more annoying. I think better sound design would help as well.
Thanks for playing!