Glad you liked it, the collision system overall is a mess and relies on me bonking out invisible boxes and not missing one... or a few. I thankful when people point out the mistakes so I can fix them. Glad you liked the small Canada hints dropped, there are some details concerning the overall world hinted at here and there, at some point I will make a world map that is likely to be equally shocking and hopefully hilarious. Jimmy Winters canadian accent is intentionally a bit uneven, I do not know if you got the conversation where he and James talk about his old football stuff but it is spelled out that he does not really have an accent left after living in America for so long but intentionally makes it stronger sometimes since he finds it makes him more "mysterious". Felt like a Canadian/American dad thing to do. 

I have a question for you: the characters in dream team come from another project if I have understood things correctly, could you point me in the direction of that game so I can play some more of your stuff? 

After reading your reply below I just noticed I could also have confused the Boss and have her attack herself

Do you know if you had the mood which gives you a confusion effect equipped? I suspect confusion might be the culprit to a couple of bugs but I am not sure. 

- please name your demo in files, folders and exe

Sure thing.

- I don't play a lot of vn, but pressing esc to accept your name seems very strange, add an "accept/finish" button, since ideally you wanna make your game enjoyable with mouse only. 

You press enter to accept it, there is a message there. Escape must work as well then. 

- clicking npc feet to select them is not good, but I understand it's a tile problem. 

This is a problem with the mouse controls which does not happen when you play keyboard only. I am considering removing them altogether as another dev suggested instead of trying to mitigate the problem more. 

- liked the videos a lot

Thanks mang!

- very good to have not enough swagger to do a special in your first atk

How the swagger system actually operates becomes much clearer later in game. Some abilities more or less work as swagger-engines, fueling your move economy. 

- tutorial laptophead is fine, but in combat it talks too much

I have been asked to include it more to explain things further so I am not sure about that one. 

- 6-7 turns to kill the second mob of the game is not fun

Depends on you item setup, if you equip the card you have just gotten from the chest next to them those encounters become a breeze. Managing your equipment is essential to the combat system, switching between moods and cards is a part of the general strategy. Most cards that are introduced have a function that makes a problem nearby easier, giving the player a hint on how to use them. 

- it's funny when you are confused the rifle gfx turns against you

Yeah, I kind of like the jank. 

- bug: if you are on the little island where you talk with little girl about fishes, you can walk on water and bypass the ladder 

This has been pointed out to me before but I forgot to fix it, thanks for reminding me. 

imo your game is prone to too much softlock: 

You are not very powerful, but you can't run away from most combat. some enemies can twoshot you some enemies get stuck in travel points (little island with ladder point) so you are fucked

The early game encounters are there to teach you how to use the moods and cards. It is a game that requires attentiveness to make combat easier but blowing through the enemies is quite possible. This is probably not something everyone will like. Grinding is optional, it makes the difficulty a lot easier but is in no way required to actually progress until act 3. I have not properly balanced everything there yet so I am unsure if this is true in the latest additions. Gaslighting counters a lot of abilities, curse acts as a boss-killer, different moods grant you immunity to different status effects etc. 

resources are super limited, and there is no indication of low lv mobs; so you can't farm

Depends, xp is actually set up so that without grinding you will naturally get full heals along the way until a resting spot can be found. Your introspection healing is usable outside of combat, this is mentioned in the tutorial. The items are mostly unnecessary in act 1. 

I have confused messages of what I should do as a player, should I farm or avoid enemies? This is a bad middle ground. Or you make a silent hill experience where you can avoid most combat because everything is very dangerous, and you fight only when you must; or you make a classic jrpg.

This one I disagree with. Clearing it without any grinding at all is not easy but it is completely doable if you take the time to prepare for encounters. Autosave in every area does make trial and error less punishing. This is a matter of taste and not right or wrong. 

A simple solution to solve this first location with grandma at the center would be to place a restore point at grandma house, but ofc it would ruin the atmophere

You can unlock two different kinds of restore points in that very house, there are some story-related hints dropped on how to do so. 

Thanks for playing it! Act 1 overall acts as a tutorial even if you do not choose to enable the tutorial options. It does take some dedication to understand as it is intentionally obtuse. I think there is an audience for that kind of experience and further on it will become apparent how it reflects the story. I do not think it is for everyone however. I loved the first fear and hunger game which is a much more punishing experience, if you want something to compare the difficulty level too that would be it. This shit is way more lenient and obvious though. 

Thanks for the very good feedback!

• Having to click on the “base” tile that a character is on instead of being able to click anywhere in their body is confusing and can make you think that something isn’t interactable when it is.

The mouse controls are an inherent addition of using rpgmaker, when I play I only use the keyboard. I have mitigated this by making the clicking easier by adding an "area of interaction" to most events, but it still does not make it perfect unfortunately. On my page I recommend people going for keyboard but I get that not everyone wants to do so and hardly anyone reads that shit. I have some ideas on how to improve this in the future but rpg maker is a limited framework. Naturally it would be better if you could just make an entire sprite clickable, perhaps this can be solved with a plugin. 

• The character changing direction rapidly sometimes when you try to move diagonally looks quite jarring, is the lack of non-cardinal-direction, non-grid movement a limitation of the engine/framework?

Many people have asked for diagonal movement, it is my personal preference to not use it, but I will take this into serious consideration and I am likely to change it I think. 

• The main character’s default walking/running animations look very rigid.

These will be redone at some point, I am not pleased with them either. I have begun remaking some of the early game graphics that I am not pleased with but my main focus for now is to keep adding to the story until chapter one is fully playable.

• Explaining all the stats at once when you shoot the deer targets is near-useless, there’s no way you’ll remember any of them, you’d have to be screenshotting the explanations or something, at which point you might as well just put that explanation in the menu when you hover on that stat’s name.

I agree that it would be a good addition to be able to hover over the stats and get information but I am not sure if this can be done. Stats are pretty simple to learn, it's basically health, magic but affects certain hidden qualities and an alternative move currency that gets filled by attacking, taking damage and some lorerelated things. I could add some additional explanations perhaps but players who progress further does pick up on this naturally just by using them. The explanations are mostly there because the names and the effects are tied into the story, it's a clue. 

• Enemies in the start seem to rarely hit any attacks. Intentional?

It is intentional. They have much lower speed values than later enemies. In the most recent parts some enemies get multiple moves per turn. People already think its hard, I tried making the speed "equal" and the ones who tried it out hated it.  

• After walking back up to the swirling tree area, walking left or right actives the trigger to go back down to the bonefield. This is easy to do if you click anywhere that isn’t directly above the character, as the game tries to move horizontally first even if you click right above the player and only very slightly to the side.

This cannot be fixed, the transfer points are set and the reason they become almost to friendly is due to the "area of interaction". Lowering it makes it too hard instead, with keyboard it works as intended. If I can find some solution I will try to mitigate this. 

• I just realised arrow keys do movement too, had presumed mouse movement was the only control scheme. Is there any reason for walking to exist when sprinting does the exact same but faster, and is the default when using the mouse? Though I would prefer to use the keyboard, I don’t like having to use both hands just to move (or awkwardly press the arrow keys and Right Shift with the same hand).

There is an option in the menu for having dash always on. I like to alternate between them. 

• The red flashes from what I presume is the curse draining my health are too strong, they give me the same funny feeling that seizure-inducing gifs do (I am not epileptic but am mildly sensitive to the same flashes). Same goes for the flashes when touching into the deer that you can’t fight.

The flash effect is also inherent to rpg maker, what I could do is change the color red in the palette, but this would change a lot of other things. If you interacted with the doll in the area where you initially kill a deer tutorial guy explains how curse works. I tried to make the doll as obvious as possible. I will add a seizure-warning to a future build, later in the game there are some effects that are really intentionally obnoxious to get a point across. You can watch an example of this here, flashing lights warning: 

• I totally get it if you’re going for a “tough as nails, doesn’t hold your hand” game, but yeah it feels pretty sucky to blow your healing items on not realising the curse is draining your health mega fast,

Curse is explained and is actually a key part of the narrative, but I think you may be correct. What I should do is add a message from the tutorial guy in combat for the two initial encounters where curse is first used. 

• The 2nd time you approach the mirror that teaches gaslighting, it vanishes while the character is saying “I need to find her…”

Thanks for pointing this out, I have made this mistake plenty of times with the chests, it is easily fixed with a "direction lock". 

I am very happy you liked it! What activities did you choose for Sarah?  I wanted to make act3 a bit leaner since there is so much story that needed to get done,  I still like grinding so my compromise was to make a dedicated area for people such as me who just like to see numbers go up, thus the grinding hole. 

If you do not grind at all and enter at lvl 17 the bosses you mentioned are punishing, if you do grind they naturally become a lot easier but all of the main skills are gotten at the levels you naturally would get as you progress through the story (and use the free level-up items). It can be cleared without them but it is a challenge. 

If you have any particular opinions on the narrative I would love to hear them. 

Its big, it has about 5 hours of story at the moment and they way it is setup requires it to load all cutscenes and maps before the game begins to function properly. This is something I am going to get to work on much later. For me it usually takes about a minute and then there is no loading at all throughout the rest of the game, although I have added 7-8 second transfer cutscenes to get the pacing correct in some of the much later parts. I just uploaded a fullscreen version. You can go fullscreen by command in the "normal version" but it kind of blurs it a bit. Fullscreen version cannot go windowed however, its stupid, but ya know, work in progress. 

Can't ask you for much input unfortunately, each act ramps up the tempo, visuals and the combat system, you would have to spend some time on it, I am really thankful for you trying it out and if you ever choose to continue playing it let me know what you thought afterwards. It was like this the last jam too and I have added a big chunk of story since then. I got a lot of feedback the week after once interested people had more time to give it a shot. Perhaps I can lure you in with this: 

The crazy gets stronger. 

With sprite-sorting issues you mean which "layer" something is on and how it interacts right? Some of it will be fixed eventually when it comes to some environmental-stuff, objects and characters will probably be wonky forever. I really dislike diagonal movement for some reason, I like that classic movement... but I will consider it since plenty of people have mentioned it.