Hi there!

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:

So, in all honesty, I've kinda dreaded writing this review, because we know each other, and I've adored your previous work, and something tragic happened while I played this game :(

And I'll just put it simply - I softlocked several times when trying to play this game.

I even accidentally broke the game jam rules in trying to circumnavigate the softlock because I thought maybe I'd done something wrong and that somehow qualified me to try to keep this game going. But I found the softlock several times.

Let me iterate - I found it after the 10 minute mark, and thus, this is not a disqualified game.

But it just means that I didn't get past the initial house area. I got stuck folding washing.

It's a nice game up until that point! And maybe I have an inkling of what it would be like after that? But I'm just really sad that I kept getting stuck at that point.

But let me talk now about the game itself - it's got an immaculate atmosphere with fantastic mapping and a beautiful sound. I liked the slow-paced walking around and being in this general vicinity. I admire the structure of being able to do these menial tasks in any order the player chooses, and the flow of these tasks was calming and soothing. Picking all the vegetables from the garden was maybe a bit frustrating because I didn't know which plants were ready to be picked based on their small differences in graphics, but that might be on me. I also didn't immediately think of the pig being in the grain field, but I concluded it based on the idea that "the developer wouldn't have put that there for nothing, surely?" And then I just ended up going on every square of the map trying to interact with everything. Which isn't my favourite idea of gameplay. BUT I do like the *ideas* involved. I liked the concept a lot.

I was thoroughly engaged throughout. I think this is mostly because the concept is very fresh and interesting for an RPG Maker game, or just a game in general. I want to see more games with this type of vibe. So I admire when a game goes for conflicts that aren't immediately obvious. And this game balanced this quite nicely.

Graphically, the feeling of being in this environment was very soothing, and I think it did its job. Plus, the inclusion of the popup message boxes to indicate conversation were very immersive and worked here very well, I thought. Especially considering the short conversational fragments that were often used in quick succession between two of the characters. I think it worked really well. Just a good vibe all-round. Great music and sound effects too.

The softlock occurred after the 10min mark. My sprite went invisible and I was unable to exit an area unintentionally. There were also passability glitches and ordering glitches, like being able to walk up the house walls and such.

So I did like what I played, but I felt like I didn't really get to the meat of the game's story. I did the initial encounter, which feels like the intro to a greater conflict.

But yeah, that's the basic idea I have of this game. I don't feel as if I experienced enough of it to give an overall idea of the story as a whole, because I got softlocked so early. What is there is pretty nice, though?

Thanks for making this game. I appreciate you as a team, and I hope you are doing well. Cheers and cheers <3

This is a very nice, pleasant game. I like it!

Playing through what is ostensibly a book in RPG Maker was pretty compelling! I like the ways the engine was used to set certain scenes and bring the player into the moment, even if the moment wasn't inherently enjoyable, like needing to carry water from a well or feed a cow some hay. The dialogue did well to maintain the setting and had some inadvertently comedic moments, if only because of how much it either juxtaposes or reflects the modern day. Characters are complaining about becoming spinsters at the age of twenty, meanwhile I'm approaching thirty thinking about the exact same thing.

There are some issues with the tileset layering and collision which do deter from the immersion. After finishing a dialogue with a character nearby a tree, Marilla walked upward to the roots of it which were incorrectly layered to appear over her head.  I just imagined her saying "Yes, that's nice dear, but hold a moment--I'm about to become a tree."

I'll also add that this game's style might be more strongly hit-or-miss for most people. I was interested in the narrative-driven experience--especially since interacting with people in town seemed to yield quite a few responses--but I imagine others might need more visual flourishes or choices to find it compelling. Character portraits and/or a visual novel structure might create a punchier visual impression which could help others in seeing it through, though I do like the way the story was formatted here as well. Great work!

Hello! This will be a hard one to comment, since I can see the intentions behind but it I'm hardly a player that enjoys this sort of slow rural stories. Also I'm sorry in advance for being quite direct on some comments, but I want to clearly convey my thoughts.

First of all, the presentation looks very good. The artstyle is perfectly coherent, and the music and sounds work really well for the atmosphere.

The gameplay is... very simple. I think that might fit well for the game you're trying to make, but there were two things that I found unnecessary: first, at certain points the game hardly gives you directions, like it tell you to go to the city but it's not clear where you do need to go or you don't know where the place is, since the player doesn't know how the town is structured. Also, at a certain point having the character move at almost the slowest speed possible and having to go to the town and back without a crystal clear destination in mind is a little extreme. I was worried I might go the wrong way and had to painfully walk back to look elsewhere. That might've been for immersion and to show the old age of the character, but gameplay-wise felt very cheap.

While for the story, I liked a lot the concept of the "dreams" - the story overall has an interesting idea, even if I only played for a little longer than 1 hour so I didn't experience it in full.
Though I did not like how the slow-burn slow-life narration was handled: a lot of dialogue was devoid of character personality, and were mostly used to convey information. You try to replicate the vibes of a book, but you should keep in mind that in the books they carefully describe what happens in between the lines, like characters emotions, shifts in attention and all, while here we just had plain dialogue (even if the visual helped a little).
And as a extra note, I realized that there are some redundant dialogues that make the narration flow in a less fluid way, like the protagonist repeating three times what happens with the bubbles, even if the player clearly saw it the first time. Also having a lot of family names thrown around in conversations made me sometimes lose the concentrations and the immersion in the story.

I'm always curious to see how someone approaches a slow story, since it's a very difficult feat to pull off, and unfortunately I would say that there was some stuff that didn't really stick with me here, but it's a commendable feat nevertheless to pull off in a month.
Here's the VOD: 

This is a very sweet game. I like the feeling it invokes. You've added a lot of beautiful touches with the graphics. Very nice stuff.

Like another player said, I found passibility issues with almost every house that I checked. I also locked myself out of progressing by making the soup before feeding the pig. I also found another issue that when carring the pot I was able to cross through the field and the girl got stuck somewhere behind me. It didn't cause any lage problems though.

Really nice, calming presentation. Like the sprite animations and the flowers swaying in the wind. Music is basic RPG Maker though. Story wasn't my type of story, so won't comment much on that. There were some passability tile errors and when I had picked up all the vegetables and put them in the stew before feeding the pig, I think that locked me out of advancement, so I had to load to advance story.

The Dreamweaver of Avonlea

We had a lot of fun working on this little jam game together, mixing public domain books that we recently read with classic RPG Maker storytelling and a touch of vagabond magic.

We sought to capture the cozy rural feelings found in Anne of Green Gables, and the dreamy wonder of Seeker's Reverie to tell a story about going beyond the expectations of your world and your life.

— Janeodee and Keadin