Punishing players for playing your game doesn't make me feel like shit, it's just kinda funny. I only ever potentially feel bad for things that I've done because I wanted to instead of some sort of feeling of "this is probably the only way to progress" It's like You, me and her. Where the game tries to make the player feel bad for following the other route even though the "good" route is clearly short and feels incomplete to bait the player into making the "bad" decision so that they feel bad.
That being said this game is way better than You, me and her because You, me and her is a joke game like desert bus. Whereas your game has characters I'm somewhat interested in. When I booted your game for the first time I had a feeling you would try to pull something like this lol. I thought you might be going for a "the world is incomplete" vibe and every update is like the world being made. If you just use this to trap players it doesn't make them feel bad, it's forced and reeks of poor writing/design. "I cannot get this player to feel bad he's just playing normally. What about if I just fuck him over on purpose? loooool Oh wait he just used a save state instead. Okay." It's the reason why save states are gonna be so popular. I don't feel bad and the chances are I will never feel bad. That probably goes for other players too. As they will likely just eject from their dead saves lol.
You might wanna punish everyone at this rate people on perfect saves will either be reading a guide or save stating and people on bad saves will even stop giving a shit because they know they've been baited down this path through intentional design. Trying to invoke some sort of emotion for things they couldn't prevent without being a time wizard or something. Makes me think your story might be one of those 2deep4u ones about the consequences of your actions but in reality most people aren't gonna care. Because the ideal save file in game version 1.0 will probably have no events done. The ideal one is probably one where you don't even jump in the beginning and you'll tell us "just because it was the only option I gave you was to jump andyou jumped peculiar hmmmmmmm
?".
Regardless I will probably follow this game through save states or maybe even my default state because this is kinda funny to me. Like You, me and her was more comedy to me than horror.