exploring a 3D ascii town totally devoid of life (with the presence of a graveyard being the only reminder that such a thing once existed) really does well to hit on that good good Creepy Old Game vibe but more specifically i like how much this authentically hones the kind of antiquated creepiness which feels both like it was already supposed to be creepy but is made even more unsettling by the passage of time. and the lo-fi aesthetic, besides looking rad as hell, also makes this one of the few 3D games that doesn't imbue my laptop with the heat of a thousand suns while it's running. which is a nice bonus.
...that said, i think the presentation is lacking when it comes to the audio. mostly the footsteps- i feel i would've been less bothered by the repetition of the walking sound if there was at least an extra "hard surface" footstep sample used for indoor areas and rooftops or something. and i personally would've preferred if the sound effects were put through a filter to sound all crunched up and compressed to fit the visuals, but that's just me.
the mechanic of being able to cheat death by retreating to the tower you start in is a pretty neat way of incorporating a substantial safety net balanced out by requiring the player put in the effort to make it back in time. i actually found myself gaming the system a bit by leaving the letters closest to the tower alone until i was one mistake away from making the hangman, so i could just go back to one of those letters, touch it, finish the hangman, and enter the tower right after. not sure if this strategy's existence would be seen as a bug or a feature from the design side of things though.
overall, this is a super interesting take on adapting hangman into videogame form in a way that retains the same overarching structure of gradually uncovering the word being guessed, while also taking advantage of the genre of 3D first person exploration in order to transform it into a radically different-feeling experience that relies just as much on spatial navigation skills as it does on deductive reasoning/pattern recognition.