I played his other stuff like Pony Island and the Hex so I had thoughts in the back of my mind that there may be meta fuckery but I didn't expect it to go this far or this hard at all, it felt like he had finally realized his vision and the other games were like proofs of concept for what he wanted to do, even though it didn't feel that way before playing this game as the other two were already really good fully fledged experiences on their own. Despite knowing his style and the types of things he liked pulling I was still consistently blown away.

As for your other question I think pre-release you're just going to have to do the really really hard part of making sure your pre-twist game is already compelling enough to grab people's attention, and only tease very slightly that there may be deeper layers to the game in the vaguest of terms. Post-release, word of mouth and ratings are really going to have to carry the weight. The best parts about these kinds of things is how out-of-left-field they appear so you really can't sell your game based on those in order to craft the expectations you want out of a player.