In the process I noticed the XP bar overflowed; after reading the thread it appears that "Level Up" is an option now vs an automatic action -- this was not clear at all from the gameplay. I never got a chance to go back and try it, because:
I also had some weird blank screen thing when talking to Arethusa(?) after charming her, talking to her a second time and on the path to the FJ. I don't remember the exact choices but it's like the scene renderer shit the bed and then the dialogue window disappeared and I couldn't do anything but ALT+F4 the game.
I appreciate you putting in some play time and providing feedback on a couple places you had issues. The XP overflow might be something new because I have not had anyone report it yet. I have not yet changed the level up system, so it is still going to just pop-up when a level is due, or at least it should have. Obviously something didn't trigger that, so I'll look into it.
It is possible there is a typo in the Arethusa script. When I rewrote the scripting parser that improved the speed by 10x, I had to convert all of the existing scripts to the new format, and some of it was done through find and replace. It's possible there was an extra space or tab in there that didn't get processed correctly. I'm going to take a look at the script and see if I can find it. Again, thank you for reporting this.
I don't know how much you've followed the updates the past couple of months but significant time and play testing by volunteers went into improving the stability of the game. And while many people report no crashes or freezes with this latest version, your experience has been different, but much better than what some people experienced just a few months ago. I'm not making excuses for bugs and telling you to just accept them, but it sounds like you actually got some good amount of play time, which I feel is a success given some of the trouble people had not too long ago.
I second this. I was about to ask if the game was still unplayable ? But it seems so
Different people have reported different experiences. I've been told many players play for hours on end and only encounter an occasional hiccup. Since the game autosaves you never lose progress if you just have to restart the game real quick.
I encourage you to try the game for yourself, and if you have an issue please report it to the Discord so I can look into it for you and get it running right.