SeaLiteral thanks for the review

Story and theme: I liked the story, but not so much the spelling. I get that the characters might speak a bit informally, but the writing looks a bit sloppier than what I’d expect if it were intentional. Aside from using “am” instead of “I am” and “it” instead “it’s”, there’s no punctuation marks at the end of most lines. I think I also saw a few typos.

Being a horror story, and involving supernatural things, I guess it’s a pretty good fit for the jam’s theme.

Audio: There doesn’t seem to be music, and while silence can be powerful at times, I’d argue it would have been more effective if there had been some music on the main menu and in the initial not-so-scary parts of the story, then have the music disappear when the characters leave the home (you could have it come back later if there’s some time you feel like it would make sense), and perhaps also have it temporarily stop when Cairo sleeps.

There do seem to be sound effects, and you seem to have used them pretty well. And since you have screams I guess I could even say you have voice acting.

Art: simple but gets the job done. And there’s actually quite a lot of it for such a short entry.

UI and accessibility: Default Ren’Py UI with portraits but without character colours. I think that’s okay. Not every VN, especially jam VNs, should need to make a customised UI, and there’s even plenty of entries in this jam that don’t put speaker portraits in the textbox, so in that aspect of UI design you did a bit better than average.

But then there’s the handwritten letter: the font isn’t very readable (I tried pressing shift-A and testing each of the font options, but it didn’t change anything). And if I just leave it on screen for a while it disappears. Also, if I try to click the back button after viewing the letter it goes back to the choice.

Marketing: The capsule shows the game’s artstyle, and it also sorta shows that it’s a story about being at night in a place one would normally only be in during the day.

And when I look at the list of submissions and see this one, I see the game’s capsule, title and developer but not the logline, unless I hover on the entry, then I see some text from the game’s page which gives me an idea what it is about, although even in that short bit of text the grammar isn’t perfect. Also, it says it’s about friendship, but having read the VN, I think once the characters get in dangerous enough situations they care more about getting out of the building themselves than making sure their friends get out too.

There’s screenshots, nice… but I noticed there was blood in one of the screenshots but no content warnings. You might want to look at the page of an entry called Maiden’s Dissection which also involves dismemberment and dead bodies, and warns about it without making the warning too spoilery. Or you could choose not to care about spoilers and actually say “This game contains doodles of dismembered dead bodies and blood of one or more characters”. And you’d probably want to also show the warning in the game, such as next to the main menu (look for screen main_menu in the file screens.rpy, then look for the line that adds a background image, then below that line you can add a frame with text, I’ll put an example below).

# Look for the following lines:
screen main_menu():

    ## This ensures that any other menu screen is replaced.
    tag menu

    add gui.main_menu_background
    # Then add the following (you can change the text and position if you want)
    frame:
        xalign 0.25 yalign 0.2
        text "Warning: This game might show drawings of violence and gore."

What I liked most: The sound effects and the story. What I’d suggest changing: add a content warning, at least on the game page, and probably add something in the “short description” field.