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Thank you for such a wonderful detailed message! I'm glad you're generally enjoying your time with the game. I'll try to address all your points here.

First, thanks very much for the Milton related bug reports. I had no idea any of that was happening and those are all definitely bugs that I'll need to take a look at more closely and see if I can come up with some way to fix them. Things can get especially weird when deaths happen mid-quest sequence and I thought I got most of those straightened out elsewhere but... apparently not for Milton and Jack's stuff based on what you were experiencing with that.

It really helps to receive reports like this because while I did plenty of testing myself, I didn't have a large pool of testers or anything to help point out issues, and some of these events are interwoven in ways that make unexpected errors and require complexities behind the scenes to get them to work together fluidly. So they can appear to be working as intended for the most part, until things proceed in a certain way that wasn't tested specifically, and then everything breaks as you're experiencing in your playthrough.

I appreciate the kind words, and again am glad you are enjoying your time with the game. The amount of people that discovered the game during the recent giveaway period has honestly been staggering compared to the relatively small amount of attention it had received in the entire year prior to it, so it has been very helpful and wonderful to see so much interest all of a sudden these past few weeks during the giveaway period. More than anything I just hoped people would find the game and be able to have fun with something a little different than most games out there, and now that's finally starting to happen it seems.

The quirkiness of character design was part of the fun, but also it was to help facilitate things more easily to be honest too. At first I had the idea to name each NPC as you see in some games where it's descriptive of an impression you might get from them or some kind of aspect of their personality or facial features, etc. but I ran out of ideas pretty quickly for keeping them unique and fun, and trying to create multiples of them with the admittedly strange way that I decided to do random NPC dialog in this game, well it started to get to be a lot of tedious extra work for seemingly little gain, so I simplified this process a bit by simply calling them all either "Ladies" or "Gentlemen" and it was solely based on their templates during character creation.

Some of the ladies look a lot more like gentlemen from a visual perspective, and vice versa, and some of the color combinations or hairstyles are a little less reserved too, but I wanted them to stand out from one another and wasn't too worried if they took on unusual garb or hairstyles/colors etc. There's no deep reason behind this from my personal standpoint other than wanting the NPCs to be visually interesting and somewhat distinct from one another, but if you're finding meaning and significance to it beyond my simplistic ideas for them, then I think that's wonderful in its own right.

Leaving an area and immediately coming back to it, in order to progress events, is not an exploit or anything like that. I realize it can be a little bit immersion breaking in a sense, but I'd rather have player convenience in this case. It's how I often did things myself during testing and while playing through the game, and honestly once you figure out that's how the game's progression works, I kind of expect folks to decide to do it that way for time saving/convenience sake.

I could have done it more traditionally where I decided to lock progression behind an ingame timer system, or some other event triggering someplace else, but I was never quite satisfied with any implementation of that nature that I could come up with, as it hampered some of the freedom of player choice to decide how and when they wanted to do things and in what order, so I just left it up to the individual person to decide how they want to go about it. You could just as easily forget about a quest line for awhile and come back to it 30 minutes later as you could progress it completely in 5 minutes by moving between the nearest screen/area transition. Totally up to you!

Madeline is a very special case, even among the rest of the cast of playable characters, and I'm glad to hear somebody stumbled upon the ability to play as her organically without knowing about it ahead of time. The theme I had in mind for her character was definitely anger and/or revenge, so I'm also glad to hear that came across well. As you no doubt noticed, things end up proceeding in interesting ways as you are playing as her, and I had a lot of fun with making one character like her break (almost) all the established rules of the game. She's absolutely one of the later characters in the roster, and none of the others are like her honestly.

In addition to offering a unique experience among the cast, another thing I had hoped to accomplish with her being one of the later characters was that, if players were struggling with the game and dying frequently and feeling frustrated, they just might try the other option in the afterlife and find themselves playing as her, and she represents somewhat of a "free pass" through the mansion, to make the game easier to get through than it normally otherwise would be.

As to your last question, I'll just make some generalized points here without spoiling the story specifics: You can find characters who have gone missing, and those who have stayed behind. However, once they are "gone" via either method, you can no longer return them to their usual places in the game, so you "lose" them from a functional, quest fulfilling, friendship gaining standpoint at that time.

One of the reasons I chose to make it so you could save (almost) everywhere in the game was so that folks could frequently save/reload as they pleased if that was how they wanted to experience the game. I wanted the game to be enjoyable to progress through and not seen as a hassle where you had to go back and redo a bunch of stuff.

However that said, it was fairly intended that most players would probably take one initial playthrough to really figure out the game and how it works, and then potentially another separate playthrough (which ends up being much shorter than the first time through as the game is now understood and known) to be able to get the exact experience out of it that they intended, though of course that's also possible with generous use of save files and reloading etc. even on a single playthrough. Or you can play through the game dozens of times if you're having enough fun with it to justify that. I wanted folks to have as many possible ways of approaching and enjoying the game at their own pace and in their own way as I could come up with.

Thanks again for reaching out and sharing your experiences with the game. I'm going to give it some more time and see if there are any other errors and such that people uncover now that more folks are in there and playing the game, and I'll be able to consider some bug fix updates and such in the future.

I just wanted to add an additional note here for you, that today I have updated the game to version 1.1. The issues that you reported here with Milton's quest restarting when it shouldn't be, and the subsequent blocked entrance to the mansion should be resolved now in this new version.

You can see the other changes in today's devlog post here if you're curious: https://jayrayhawk.itch.io/dp/devlog/155544/a-new-version-v11-of-death-preposter...

It's a minor update however, and I consider it non-essential for returning players, though would recommend it for folks who haven't downloaded the game yet. So only grab the new version if you feel like it's compelling enough incentive for you.

Thanks again for letting me know about your experience with the game both good and unexpectedly strange! I especially appreciate getting to hear from people who had fun with it.