You got a very interesting art style. It’s simple, but with a very expressive aesthetic. I like it a lot.
During the very long intro sequence of the game I got convinced that I was reading a kinetic novel. And then suddenly… I am in a point&click adventure? If this had been my game, I would have added some more interactivity during the into sequence to even out the pacing of the game.
During the playable section I spent quite a lot of time looking around not really knowing what I was supposed to be doing. I couldn’t find out how to open the inventory until I read about it in the game description. It also took me embarrassingly long to find the fisher guy. Finding a branch in a forest was more difficult than it should be, and I also had problems finding the “protruding branches” trigger.
Puzzle gameplay is difficult to get right. What seems “pretty straightforward” from our perspective as developers can be completely obscure to the player. And what seems like impossible to solve for us without the right clues can sometimes turn out to be simple enough to just brute-force and solve by accident. It takes a ton of experience to get the difficulty of puzzles just right.
Also too bad that the game ends where it actually gets interesting. Seems like you had much greater plans, but ran out of time. Unfortunate how game development projects always take 3 times as much effort to implement as they felt like during planning. That’s why I usually try to keep my scope as minimal as possible during game jams, try to get a minimum viable product finished long before the deadline, and then use the rest of the time for expansion and polish.
But it seems like you got a solid narrative and point&click framework out of this jam which you can utilize for future projects. I’ll be curious what you are going to use it for.
(Oh, and just a heads-up: You included the “BurstDebugInformation_DoNotShip” folder in your game build. I am not sure why Unity Technologies advises not to distribute that folder, but they probably have a reason. You might want to reupload the game without that folder included)