Thank you for your review!
I'm glad you liked the premise and the story. Truth be told, I started with the mechanics for this game rather than the story, so I was worried it would come across as rushed or unfinished. The story took some inspiration from the Ys series, although I wanted it to still be my own interesting spin on it rather than a copy-paste of their stories.
I always add the manual into games I make, especially ones where the player might step away for a long time and possibly forget things. The last thing I want is a player coming back to the game after a long time away from it and being completely and utterly lost.
I'm also glad you liked the island map, I try to make sure the maps in my games look good while also not hindering the player's ability to traverse them.
I really should have added more guidance, but to tell the truth I wasn't certain how to effectively give guidance without holding the player's hand too severely. Creating tutorials has always been somewhat of a weak point for me, because I'm never sure how to go about adding them without confusing the player or boring them.
It's odd that the water source dried up, because it's not supposed to do that. The eventing logic was set up so that, if you have an empty bottle you can fill it with water, and if you don't then you can't get another water bottle out of nowhere. I'll have to look at that and see if maybe a bug slipped through my admittedly barebones system.
And yes, the loading issue has been brought up by many other people who have given Adrift a try. I'm not certain what causes this issue, since at least on my end (in playtest, in the deployed copy, and in the .exe copy) saving works perfectly fine. I have been directed towards a possible alternative, so I will likely be trying that system out in the post-jam version and seeing if that solves the loading issue.
I like the suggestion of creating a tutorial area, that's definitely something I will try out in the post-jam version since that won't have the 30 minute time limit.
I did try and slow down the sleep meter (the current version is about 2x slower than the original version was, when I was just testing out the mechanic), so I'll definitely try and slow it down even more.
As I said earlier, I'm going to look into the event logic for the water source to figure out why it dried up for you, because the way I set it up it is supposed to be infinite.
I appreciate your advice and the good/bad that you pointed out. Thank you again for the review, and for giving my entry a look!