Wow, so this is also your first complete game? That's awesome - congrats! 🎉🥳
Yeah, it's definitely a tricky balance to strike when creating a mystery story. *EDIT: I feel like "The Suspect" is almost there, but it's missing a couple dotted i's and crossed t's, as you mentioned. There's a reason mystery writers came up with a list of "fair play rules," whether that's Ronald Knox's "Commandments" or Van Dine's Rules. Kinjo Goldbar, the host of the jam, has a lengthy post and video talking about making mystery game visual novels, although I feel like it applies to any kind of mystery game/story.
Ahhh, gotcha, so that was the intended connection to the storage room - makes sense. 👍 I guess I didn't notice them there, since the storage room was the first place I checked and I didn't seem to find anything near or around the barrels, despite one of the characters telling me to look there for clues. 😅 Maybe I missed them because I wasn't looking for them there, and by the time I found the other ones, the countdown was almost up so I didn't have a chance to double back.
Out of curiosity, have you ever played Murder Most Misfortunate (also available on Steam)? It's more of a visual novel, but "The Suspect" reminds me of a game jam version of it, which is pretty cool! e.g. MM has an option for a real live countdown timer, after which you have to present your deductions.
Regarding the lighting and camera sensitivity, I'm glad you're considering adding settings for those in a future build! 🙏 Also, if you wanted to patch those in, on the Mystery Gamedev Discord server, Kinjo mentioned that jam participants can upload additional game builds (with things like updated features, bug fixes, etc.) as separate files (with a new upload file name) - so long as the build of the game submitted for the jam is preserved, for voting purposes - should you decide to do that. (e.g. The Suspect v1.1.zip)
Oh yeah, and one more small suggestion: personally, I find the background colour + text colour combination on the game's itch page hard to read. 🙈 Maybe brighter coloured text would stand out more against the grey background? Kinjo said on the Discord that it's okay for developers to update their game page even though the jam is over, since that's not part of the judging criteria, so feel free to tweak or mess around with that.
Again, great job! The game itself is pretty fun, and the "core" of it feels almost there, which is impressive for your first full game, especially given the time constraints of the jam! 👏