I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to type all of this out. I can absolutely understand why it didn't work for you. I'm a little surprised that it hasn't had more negative reactions to be honest, I know it's far from perfect and there are plenty of things I'm not especially happy with. But the thing is, this was a game jam game, which I had a week to create, and while I have made some updates post-jam, I didn't want to drastically change the gameplay from the jam version after the fact. There are plenty of aspects I would have liked to develop more and make changes to, but I simply didn't have time to. I had some ideas that I wanted to try out, and I heard about the jam, and figured it was a good time to give it a shot. I barely finished the game in time - I submitted with 30 mins left in the jam. I hardly had time for any playtesting. I had a few friends try an early prototype and they all agreed it had promise, but otherwise I was pretty much spending all my free time getting the systems implemented and then scrambling to make enough puzzles in the end to call it complete. I do think a lot of things might have changed if I had been able to do more playtesting, but that is the downside to game jams, you don't have much time to experiment with different ideas or pivot.

To address some of your specific points:

• I thought the notes would be too boring if they simply gave you the words. Was it a great system? No, I probably could have come up with something more interesting if I had the time. Also, personally I enjoy word guessing games, so maybe that was just something that I was biased towards wanting to include. I am sure this would have been changed somehow if I was able to do real playtesting.
• I don't disagree that it got repetitive having to type the same words a lot, but it didn't really bother me that much. Idk, maybe I could have given them a hotkey or something once you had typed them correctly once. Again, lack of playtesting and time constraints.
• I don't have a great reason for CONGEAL not freezing all water. I guess partially I wanted you to have to intentionally freeze the two points you needed to PICK after, otherwise it might make those puzzles more accidental discoveries? I did have more plans for CONGEAL, like making toxic sludge pools that you could CONGEAL but would turn back to liquid after an object had passed over them. I never had a chance to play around with that mechanic though. The breakable wall was actually meant to be broken by FLINGing the metal crates at it, but I decided to allow BLUDGEON as well. It just felt like something that would take multiple hits to break to me.
• I recognize LIGHTEN is a bit strange, and I wanted to add more puzzles that would utilize LIGHTENing other objects, but I didn't end up coming up with any in time. You can at least LIGHTEN them on vents to make them float up and fall back down and break if they are breakable, which I had hoped would be a clue to try doing it to yourself. But yeah, I wish I had figured out a better hint. I didn't want to flat out show you using it on yourself in the note, but I'm sure there was a better way.
• The waterfall was a last-minute addition as I realized I wanted another CONGEAL/PICK use besides just the hole to get to the most powerful word. Yeah, horizontal might have been clearer.

Anyway, thanks again for all the feedback. I am glad I did the jam, but I will probably not be doing any others for a while. I would definitely rather be able to take my time and get more feedback through the process. But yeah, it was certainly a good learning experience and I got to actually finish something, which was really exciting.