tl;dr: in a manner kind of like cat waitress, naomi stores her exhaustion through form swaps. This can soft lock cutscenes... can it do anything else?

Probably easier to just explain the steps that can get the glitch:

1. sprint until out of stamina as human naomi
2. while still exhausted, transform into an animal form
3. hit a trigger for a cutscene that uses human naomi
4. naomi will have her exhausted status in the cutscene

I encountered this while testing other stuff out, and carrying this exhausted status into the first mountain cutscene (where David tells you to go get the irish coffee) softlocked the game midway through the cutscene.

As is, this is just something to be aware of as an easily avoided softlock. But it does make me curious if there are other uses for the whole concept of storing stuff between form transfers. Cat waitress is the big one that's currently known, but maybe there's more? idk.

Since it'll probably get buried when I get another new PB, I wanted to post this video here - it's my current PB/WR, but I went back and did commentary for it to try to explain all the stuff going on in the run. It's my hope that this can provide at least some level of explanation of what's going on in my route (and some explanation of the game in general), so for anyone new to the game this might be a useful resource.

There are a few things I'm still trying to figure out to optimize this game. I figured I'd ask around here in case anyone has looked into it (or wants to).

Hygiene: My understanding is that hygiene is a 2-variable system (showering and beauty care) where both need to be in top condition to get optimal shop/sell prices. And beauty care decays faster than showering. I don't know exactly how long each lasts though, which might help routing things out and save a bit of time here and there.

Alien girl chicken chase: the chase sequence inside the UFO (before the cat fight). If you play through this sequence, it's clear that it's not just a matter of running at the kid, the game also has to slow her down enough to let you make contact. My friend has watched the runs on here, my plays, and a couple lets plays on youtube, and between us we think that the AI is influenced by Naomi taking chicken hits and/or dying. But we have no idea what's actually going on. Or if there is an optimal way to do that section.

David O'Reilly chase: I feel like there has to be a way to more efficiently do the section where you follow his awkward zigzag path through the snowstorm, particularly by using dog flight. The version of this section that's in my PB is probably actually slower than what you'd get if you just memorized the path and ran on it, so this is definitely an area I'd like to improve but I don't know what to do about it with visibility so screwed up by the blizzard.

If anyone has ideas, let me know! If not, I'll probably try to get to these at some point and see if I can solve any of it.