I have a tendency to get obsessive about problems I can't solve. The more complex a system is, the more I like trying to tinker with it. (My favourite genre of games are the complex civilization-building / management sim type games, if that's any insight into my personality. 
)Now that you've explained how the key works, I can understand it. I didn't notice the little icon there at first. ^_^ I thought it did something completely different.
Now, as to comments.
In retrospect, as usual, the true explanation only comes right at the end, with the twist I've come to expect from you. The trouble is, as expected, some of the choices only make sense in light of the revealed ending, not in light of what was known to the user beforehand. Now that I've seen the ending, I can understand why some choices lead towards the ending and some don't. But without that additional information provided by the ending, my entire logical train of thought was heading in the opposite direction.
Case in point: the "time" thing. Based on all the story told previously about Etsuya keeping track of time, the clock tower, and everything beforehand, it was logical for me to assume that what was going on was a closed space separated from the rest of the world by some sort of time barrier and different flows of time. All the foreshadowing pointed to that. Thus, when faced with something like choices 17 - 21, I would take the sci-fi route, based on that assumption, and attempt to find a solution to get out of the closed space, rather than protesting that it was illogical.
Had I known it was a dream-illusion, I would have had no problem saying it was illogical, and then attempting to break myself out of the dream. But since it was not revealed to me until the end that it was a dream, I kept on working on the time anomaly angle, and thought the problem had to lie somewhere else. It was actually the "Time" sequence (Q's 17-21) that led me astray.
But maybe that's because I just read too much science fiction, where anything is possible, instead of being grounded in the "real world", where anything that is impossible has to be a dream.
Nevertheless, I liked the good ending, of course, and its realism. I also liked the background artwork effect, and how that provides a subtle clue as to what the situation really is (though I didn't notice that at first). Maybe I'm just not suited to this type of story. Had I known it was a dream-illusion, I would have had no problem saying it was illogical, and then attempting to break myself out of the dream. But since it was not revealed to me until the end that it was a dream, I kept on working on the time anomaly angle, and thought the problem had to lie somewhere else. It was actually the "Time" sequence (Q's 17-21) that led me astray.
But maybe that's because I just read too much science fiction, where anything is possible, instead of being grounded in the "real world", where anything that is impossible has to be a dream.
I don't notice the atmosphere at all when I've got a problem to solve, unlike Choark. My philosophy has always been "solve the problem first, then go back and enjoy the atmosphere". Still, congratulations and well-done on this short piece.
-Dizzy-
)
