Still currently playing this game, but it's one of those games you have to take slow! The lack of english translation did put me off at first but as I grew accustomed with the controls, I sorta fell in love by how little I understood.

Hidetaka Myazaki said in an interview that during his childhood, he had trouble to understand the books he read due to the fact that most either had complicated words or were written in a language foreign to him, so he had to come up with his own imagination to fill in the blanks- and while that experience is certainly different, I can finally understand what he meant by this.

Turns out, the word I was looking for is "translanguaging". It is a process of active imagination and interpretation that not only stimulates your creativity but also strengthens your cognitive abilities. Using limited language cues, your brain will bridge the gap between what you know and what you want to understand ; as such it attempts to decipher the context, characters, plots by looking for cues. Your brain essentially becomes a problem solver.

Reading foreign texts can actually be quite beneficial, it can provide a rich and immersive experience while fostering a deeper connection with a different culture. I'm surprised by how I was able to adapt to this. I have no prior knowledge of japanese or anything as such, yet I was able to experience this incredibly well realized game!
I'm pretty sure that if this game was a VN instead, it would have been impossible for me to understand anything, but since video games allows for intuitive visual context clues and gameplay element, it wasn't all of that difficult. It also gave me greater appreciations for video games that communicate gameplay informations without using a single bit of texts, by either relying on level design or other interesting gameplay elements to communicate them.
I feel that I had to develop some deductive skills while playing this, in a way it was kind of like having a game inside of a game. I felt lost in this very deeply depressing atmosphere, trying anything I could think of, looking at every wall, interacting with every surface until something would eventually click and when it did, it felt so gratifying.

I know this "review" hasn't really been much about the game but really, what an interesting experience this has been for me, can't wait to finish it!