I played this a bit around its time of release, and I just now went through the whole thing.

There's a kind of simple earnestness that's special to the early indie revolution, especially before gamergate made everything so bitter and hateful. There's a sense of wonder in those years, like every dev was just SO excited that they got to make games, too. The obvious fourth wall breaking and dialogue poking fun at longstanding genre conventions are relics of a time when we all sat wide-eyed at all the games that felt like they were made by real people for once, people we could hang out with and who loved games themselves.

We take that all for granted now, but when you go back to a game like this, it's nice to sink back into the hope we all had at that moment. As gaming became democratized like it never was before, we got little beautiful passion projects like this.