I also think this game came down to a split between people who thought it was AI generated and those who thought it wasn’t.
On one hand, the cover art does look pretty clearly ai generated. The writing uses a really over-the-top tome and lots of emojis, the same the other ai games used tons of emojis. The different areas didn’t feel really tied together and felt a little illogical to me.
On the other hand, the art could technically be thought of as 3d art that happened to be in the style copied by AI. And a lot of the oddities in text could be put down to translation, which has less of a negative viewpoint than pure text generation. The author gave an explanation for the upbeat tone, disconnectedness, and illogicality: Mathbrush reviews IFComp 2025 (Latest: Monkeys and Car Keys, done for now) - #60 by hex
If this were entered four or five years ago, I think it would have placed higher as voters tend to be forgiving of small oddities in games as long as they’re typo free and have a lot of non-repetitive content. But with the advent of AI the perceived worth of silly but polished content has gone down with some voters.