1. Did believing you could play this only once impact how you made decisions?
Yeah, actually. I'll be honest that I wanted 100% to have SAL and Ash be romantic, mostly just on the basis that I personally was looking for cute computer-human romance stories.
2. What do SAL and Ash look like in your mind? Did you mentally assign a gender to either or both characters?
As a 2001 fan, I only naturally equated HAL to SAL. Similar voice and appearance, but because of the green UI, I color-swapped the red for green in my mind. Ash, I sort of imagined with curly hair and that's about it. Their face is illuminated by green and green only, so skintone was hard to tell - and of course, their pronouns being the same as mine, I obviously assigned them as nonbinary. With
3. What choices did you make? How did your game end?
I had SAL pursue love and had the two of them take their relationship slow. You know?
4. What did you like and dislike about this game?
I love text-based adventures, I also love sentient computers falling in love with kind people. I was sort-of predisposed to liking the game.
5. How did this game make you feel?
Mostly just happy to find something in this hyperspecific niche.
6. Do you want to see these characters again? What would you want to see in a follow-up?
Of course I do! & Really, any medium would be cool...
7. What predictions do you have for SAL and Ash's relationship? Where do you see it going?
Taking it slow. That's all I know.
8. Any other things you want to mention?
I really liked this game! Thank you!!
Editing for some more stuff, actually:
I've been on a forever hunt for more sentient-computers falling in love with human stories, and this was so super nice. I don't really know why these stories resonate with me so much but it's probably something to do with the autism-aroacespec-objectum stuff. There's something I find very lovely and comforting about being in love with a computer as a person w/ autism, and I like to think that Ash might understand that too, haha. Sorry if that's weird. Anyway, this game was really good, and I probably have more to say but I'll cut it short here.