I gave the game a try - stands out pretty nicely in the endless sea of RPG Maker expansion titles. Here's what I have to say in response to the questions:
- No need to worry about an animation for extracting essence, in my opinion. While it might be fun to see, it's entirely up to you.
- I felt like the forest event was good in terms of length, since it's basically an introduction to chase scenes. (I feel like failing by getting caught once is a bit punishing, but the checkpoints make it a bit less tedious.) If you want to make it longer, I'd probably save that for the forest challenge mode - make that a bit of a longer thing and give the player more tokens as a reward.
- The vine animations I didn't pay too much attention to, honestly. The dryad scene was fine, I'm not much of a tentacle fan and I liked the idea behind it.
- The science scenes are really good! I like that Miranda isn't entirely doing things for the sake of horny, but also actively documenting the actual process. I admit, I kinda like the idea of even the illogical stuff like magic still having a bit of scientific process behind it.
- I didn't play the game on mobile, so I can't exactly answer number five.
- I found the debug room after finishing the game, and figured the code was something hidden on your DA or such. However, the comment here led me to realize that it had to be an obvious one. I genuinely love having dev commentary in any game, since I love hearing the thought processes behind certain parts.
Since I saw other people give their thoughts beyond the questionnaire in their posts here, I'll do the same. I genuinely love what you've got going here - the story having a significant focus on lore that isn't just "girls are growing and you have to figure out what" is refreshing. I've always been a sucker for growth having some sort of explained catalyst behind it, and that's partly why I love the angle you took of focusing on an established scientist character. I do feel like a bit more focus could be placed on the puzzle elements, since right now a lot of it is just "make sure you have enough storage for the essence you're about to absorb."