Hi there!

This post might come as a surprise to you but I'm fulfilling my obligation of writing a review for every entry I played in the RPG Maker Game Jam 2025 and haven't had the time and motivation combo until now. Apologies for the wait.

I'm one of the 6 judges for this RPG Maker Game Jam 2025. I was one of the 2 judges assigned to your game, and we have been assigned to rate your games according to each metric highlighted on the game's main jam page, and submit these ratings to the organisers, who will then appropriate what happens with that. Please contact them in the Q&A if you have any further questions about the judging process. The judges will work on different time schedules, so even if I may have finished playing your game, the entire process might not be finished as of yet. Many of these reviews I am posting while still judging.

All that aside, I'd like to share my VOD of me playing your game, which contains up to an hour of gameplay, and some final thoughts at the end! Depending on whether I stopped the VOD early or not, it will also contain many of the thoughts that I say to you below, which may cause repetition. So just be aware of that.

I will also attach a review below this VOD. I will not disclose my ratings for each category as of yet, but those will be revealed in due time. Not all judges are required to post a review or VOD to each game, but many will do so even if it's optional, including myself.

Here's the VOD:

Theme
There are certainly expectations that the company has of you, the employee. Your job is to try to meet expectations. I sadly couldn't detect much "beyond expectations" context for the story, however. I was in particular looking for ways in the gameplay to exceed expectations. But maybe your relationship with the person in the breakroom as you play is something that resides outside of expectations? And that's a version of "beyond"? It's a bit of a stretch imo, but it is there, and I think more points would be awarded if it was maybe a bit more central in theme and pushed it a bit more.

Gameplay
Decent systems here. I like the theme - I'm weak to themes of therapy and mind health and stuff - but I do feel as if the systems could be baked a little more, as mentioned earlier. I liked the concept of them, but in process, as you can probably see in the VOD above, I got some unexpected results and sometimes didn't know what was happening or how to progress through a battle. However, I found many of the ideas present very interesting, and certainly I think the dev has a lot of potential to tell more stories in this vein that are very interesting indeed.

Engagement
Conceptually, it has a nice hook. The story has a hook of getting to know someone outside of the therapy sessions. But the way that it ended was quite abrupt, and I would have liked to see the themes explored to their full potential. Maybe if I got the 5/5 ending I could have been informed about the true ending, etc., but the lack of save/load system means it's a bit of a slog to try to get a 5/5 ending because failure is, in my experience, quite likely for at least 1 of the 5 with my current strategy. If I were able to load from a menu, then I might be able to get the 5/5 ending and figure out what the story was about. But that couldn't happen. I think with further polish in this area, there might be a diamond here.

Presentation
Quite nice-looking and well-polished! Has a good visual identity. Generally very competent. I liked the ideas visually, and the dungeon-explore element, and the custom drawings. Very cool all-round.

Polish
Light bug where you are able to repeat the 5th appointment an infinite number of times if you wanted to. This resets the boss appointment availability too.

Overall
I feel as if this was an entry that had a lot of potential if it were polished more and if the gameplay loop were polished a bit more too. If it were made tighter, and the themes delivered maybe a bit more powerfully (for me, at lesat), I think this would be an absolute banger. For now, I am more excited by the promise of what this developer can do if they set their minds to it.

Keep making games. Every game's a gift <3

After playing through it a couple times and getting what I assume are both endings to the game, I feel like I can adequately review this game. It's a very strange game in a sense that it isn't strange enough. Like I feel like it doesn't provide any questions or mystery surrounding our job despite the weird circumstances such as: the weird people in our office, our weird boss. the ominously tall building, etc. There are hints of something happening but they never really go anywhere. The people on our floor are just that. They aren't fleshed out or given much to say. Even people we do talk to, like the cigarette lady, don't have much to say. I feel like the vending machine has a lot more to say with the amount of drinks and descriptions of said drinks than the patients or characters. It might just be me since I'm not a big reader but I feel like a lot of these things can be shown with a shorter description to each drink. But I also don't feel like it provides a lot and is more so just a way to put in some quirky writing, which could be good, but I never feel like the tone of the game ever sticks to anything solid. It never feels serious that would contrast the zany moments and it never reaches that level of wacky that would make these moments fit well into the story it is trying to tell. 

In terms of gameplay, I appreciate the effort put into the combat at the custom UI  for the battles but with no explanation or guidance I found myself confused. Skills I would use would often be undone by the patient resulting in a very frustrating experience. The balancing in this game feels all over the place and I never felt like it was in my favor. I found myself not using a lot of the skills because they don't provide a very meaningful description as to  what they lower and what they raise.  The way I passed the majority of the sessions was by using my cooldown skill followed by a skill to lower whatever bad bar was higher. I was able to help 3 of the patients with this method but I still failed 2 of them. The patient does more damage to themselves than I am ever able to fix, especially with the freakouts they have halfway through getting their self love up. I'm not sure if that on purpose to try to say something but it definitely messes up the balancing. I was also not sure if the patients were purposely not fleshed out at all to make em feel less important, like you're just getting something done rather than taking the time to help someone. Which would be cool, but I feel like if the focus of your game is helping mentally ill patients you could at least flesh them out a little. 

Now, onto what I did like. Although this game technically takes place on 1 map I do like the plugin for the map that simulates a 3d environment. It provides a really moody graphical fidelity similar to old school dungeon crawlers. I thought the art was really cute and although taking a break wasn't really necessary to progress the game I still did so to see what was happening in the breakroom. I enjoyed aspects of the game here and there. And even thought it needs works you still tried. and that's what counts. Don't get discouraged, every moment is one for learning. 

No matter what I did, anxiety went up and the patient freaked out. I just couldn't help. Game's too frustrating for me.