I wrote this over the course of several days, so hopefully I’ve managed to keep my writing style consistent and had time to prune out any typos I might have made so I’m not mentioning “pint-and-click sequences”. And hopefully the fact that I wrote some of it during evenings where I was a bit tired hasn’t made me write like I liked the VN less than I did.

Writing: I like the story and the characters… and I just realized this might be a sequel to another VN you made. I guess I’ll read that one, probably after this month, since this month I want to read as many as possible of the entries from this jam.

Theme: It takes place during Halloween, and quite a few scary things happen. So it fits.

Audio: The music seems pretty good, although a lot of the entries I’ve played from this jam had good music, so maybe I should refer to it as average instead. And there was some piece that sounded like it had been longer and then made shorter, unless of course that was an attempt at making it spookier by having it sound like that only purpose.

Also, didn’t I turn the volume up? (Plays through the VN more times, realizing that the music volume gets reset between playthroughs.) You can set the defaults once, you don’t need to set them again every time I replay it. That’s what config.default_music_volume is for. Another way to adjust the volume would be to edit the audio files themselves.

Sound effects? Are there any? I didn’t hear any. Well, you had voice acting, which is actually harder to make. And I’d say VA also adds more to a VN than SFX, especially full VA like in this one.

I like the voice acting a lot, although I wonder if you meant for some characters to be louder than others. I guess it makes sense that Sesame/Poppy is a bit shy and therefore more quiet than Nora, but I think I’d have toned down the difference a little bit. And Koko seems to be about as loud as Poppy too. That sort of stuff is usually easiest to address by editing the audio.

Art: There’s obviously more than one artstyle in there, but the way they’re used together feels nice.

Those animal drawings at the start are cute. They’re black-and-white in an otherwise colourful VN, but that fits it being a character talking about her past. And yeah, it’s not the most common type of CG in this jam, but it’s pretty nice to see black-and-white drawings from time to time. (I’ve seen four entries with black-and-white CGs, including mine, and I think the ones in this one are my favourite black-and-white CGs so far.)

The backgrounds were nice to. They look painted and the sprites look drawn, but I don’t really mind. And they’re full of Halloween decorations.

I like the sprites too. Cartoonish, but I’m sorta used to cartoonish sprites on realistic backgrounds (it’s way more common than the other way around). And they have different expressions. And I really like that it’s easy to see who is speaking just by the sprite being larger, or in front of the text.

And the creature fading out, even though it’s not a particularly hard effect to make, works pretty well.

And with the foregrounds being cartoonish and the backgrounds painterly, I guess I don’t want anything to break that. And fortunately it didn’t get broken. The CGs have the characters drawn cartoonishly and the backgrounds blurry.

The textbox is slightly blurry, which makes it seem a bit like it’s meant to go with the backgrounds rather than the foregrounds. Or maybe it’s a way to show that the foregrounds are behind the textbox but in front of the background.

And the icon is cute too. I’m a bit puzzled by the choice of a rabbit. And “downy ears”. I guess maybe Poppy is a half-rabbit or something and that’s been mentioned in that other VN I haven’t read yet but which I found out this one might be a sequel to.

And at some point while writing this feedback I wanted to see the hand CG, so I started at the start, skipped until it, and accidentally skipped one step past it. And the back button didn’t work. It stays there, even in a colour that makes it easier to read than the other buttons, but when I click it it goes forwards rather than backwards. And CGs don’t show up in the history screen. And I don’t see a “gallery” option anyway (some VNs have that, a list of all the backgrounds and CGs you’ve seen so far, including in previous playthroughs). It seems this happens in many but not all location changes, for example it doesn’t happen when Nora and Sesame enter the café (I got unsure if I’d understood the last line before that location change, and now I know why: it has to do with the word “before”).

Fun: The story was interesting, and point-and-clicking was fun too. And I’d say the art and VA added to the fun.

The point-and-click sequences were fun but they also seemed to have some bugs:

• Remember that locked door that says “password incorrect” and stuff like that? A non-clickable version of its sprite appears in some point-and-click sequences where I don’t think it was meant to appear. Like it got added when it was needed, and then it just stays on all point-and-click screens after those.
• It’s possible to softlock some point-and-click sequences by rewinding and some items suddenly being missing in the inventory. And perhaps even more annoyingly, in that fight scene where you can pick various objects to attack with, picking the lantern second can cause it to end up being drawn on top of another object, at which point you become unable to pick that object. Another thing that can happen when rewinding is that Nora’s sprite gets stuck on later point-and-click sequences. I’m not usually a big fan of disabling the back button, but disabling it during and right after point-and-click sequences to work around a bug might be better than having the bug trigger if people rewind at those times. (I’m aware it could be a bug in Ren’Py itself, although I sorta hope it isn’t because I imagine you might find the bug harder to fix if it’s in the engine than if it’s your code.)
• Not so much a bug as a feature suggestion, but Ren’Py tries to make point-and-click stuff controllable with a keyboard, and in this one it somehow fails so the only thing that can be “clicked” with the keyboard is the satchel. Personally I prefer using a mouse on the first playthrough and the keyboard on later playthroughs, but I know that the keyboard feature is meant to be usable by people who can’t use a mouse (or are blind), so I guess for the sake of those people it might be useful to let players use it. I’m not sure why it doesn’t let me use the keyboard to highlight other objects (maybe there’s several screens on the screen and it has trouble jumping between them if they overlap or something).

I remember that in the fight I kinda thought the lantern could maybe be used as a weapon, and then I saw the character come to the same conclusion. I think it was nice to figure out something a moment before the character figured it out. I guess the door password could have worked like that too, except I didn’t know that that character had that name, so I couldn’t have guessed the first one.

What I liked most: the voice acting, the drawings, the story… it’s hard to choose.

What I’d suggest changing: The programming issues, especially the softlocks and the audio volume issue.

The amount of voice acting in this is super impressive - well done to everyone who organized that! The world is really interesting, and definitely something I'd love to see more of as you continue to release more vn's in the Aldrich Academy universe - seems from the ending that there might yet be more to explore in this particular thread (though I'll spill no spoilers here!). The costume designs are cute and the story a sweet one - rooting for them all!