any way to get an explanation of the lore?

[False Prophet]

I know it is somewhat secondary to the experience itself, but I find it to be intriguing. I always assumed it was a person lost within their own trauma/psyche. Reliving their past experiences in a continuous cycle, sometimes beating it and often times failing to win against their own darkness.

[Twice Different]

There's a lore discussion channel in our Discord[discord.gg] where people have put their theories if that's of interest.

For us it's most interesting to leave it a bit open to interpretation and let players piece together the puzzle details, though I will say your read is pretty aligned with the general ideas.

As an extra behind-the-scenes info: originally the items were all presented in more lore-tied rhymes as well, but testers couldn't tell what the items did, so pretty early in the process we changed them to be all functional descriptions.