I loved the player sprite and colorful environments. The gated progression was quite confusing but definitely inspired me want to explore, which is what the purpose of a demo is so I can barely fault it for that. However, I wouldn't have included unfinished areas in the screen shots, that confused me quite a bit.

The sound was especially well done and matched the theme and character of the game nicely. I love those pitch bends in the melody channel. Good sound design overall. 

The title screen, while good, lacked the same polish that the rest of the games visual's possessed. The bookshelf motif is wonderful and works well for the game,  but the logo lacked the same charm when rendered as simple line art. I had trouble remembering the name of this entry , which could be due to the logo, or the poorly named rom file submitted (acronyms don't work in a big list of roms, hint hint). 

These criticisms are only meant to be helpful, I am highly impressed with the casual world building on display here and I really hope you continue development. This is a wonderful game. 

Very polished and ultra-charming!

I was gonna write that the map layout for the demo could benefit from being (a lot) tighter, but it seems that others have already addressed that (and for the full game, the very open layout seems like it will be part of its appeal, especialluly if there's ample enough content and non-linearity in regards to accessing it.)

This is the only game my kid (4) played through (almost) entirely unassisted, btw.

I'm not sure if the game's intended for an early childhood/all-ages audience, but we enjoyed it on that level very much.

On one hand, the difficulty curve is *very* accessible, and the gameplay quite cute. But on the other, the titlescreen aesthetic feels more serious, and I was always expecting the overall mystery to take a suddenly dark turn.

That said, the only thing that caught me off guard as I was reading the word balloons to the kid was the shootout and that boss's dialog. The violence/gunplay of which seemed to come just far enough out of left field to feel uneasy, but not far enough to feel absurd or humorous (which that unease may very well have been the intention; in which case, it was successful). Even though it occurs within a book, it felt more violent/real/high stakes than, say, in CatMercs which revolves around a screen full of bullets (which I admit I didn't think twice about while playing with the same child 😅)

Anyway, I'm not writing persuasively one way or the other. Just leaving the account of our gameplay here to give you a look at how it went down.  We're both very much looking forward to the full version, btw. 

I wish that there could be community votes on these games here.  This one was fantastic - there's so much variety in environments and gameplay that is presented.  The fact that your low/med/high notes can affect the enemies in different ways is a really cool touch that adds a lot of potential for puzzle solving.

Wow, this one's super polished and professional, with so many fun little details. The library was neat, but the game got awesome when it went wild west and I kept playing til the end. My only complaint is it gets non-linear extremely fast. I'd recommend starting linear and let the player accomplish a goal first before introducing branching paths. Or perhaps a bit more explanation on what to accomplish.

Bug report: there's a tile in the purple room that isn't a door but acts like one. It teleports the player to two different locations, depending on the scroll position. There's also a pit in the library which softlocks you.

I haven't finished yet but I'm really impressed by the sheer variety of areas and art. Also the writing is hilarious, I laughed at the janitor conversations. I got confused about where I was a few times, and lost out in the wild west for a while, but that's probably just down to my own poor spatial memory. Fun!