This demo has great art. However, the art aside, everything else is bad and needs to be improved. Now, I realize that it's an unfinished demo, so some of my points can be explained by that, but I still thought I should mentioned them just in case:
- It's annoying that you must click through the dialog before you can interact with anything. In the tutorial it says: "Try pressing this coin slot", but not matter where and how many times you press it - it does not work. Turns out you have to click on the dialog box saying these instructions before you can press it. I spent solid minute pressing the coin slot and just the vending machine in general in every possible place! So within 30 seconds of playing the game, a player is already stuck and thinks the game has bugged. I actually closed the game because of this issue, as I couldn't figure it out. This is not good user experience. I did reopen it later, thinking that restarting it would fix this, and eventually figured out that you had to dismiss the instructions first.
- The coin sorting algorithm is way too inefficient. When you have 5,000-10,000 yen, the game freezes for over 5 seconds when you click on the vending machine's coin slot. At least it does on the browser version of the game (Google Chrome, Ryzen 9 5950X, RTX 3070 Ti, 32GB RAM).
- Also, if you manage to click it multiple times in a row because of this freeze, the coins will get sorted multiple times, prolonging the game freeze.
- It's also a bit annoying how higher value coins cover up lower value coins that you might want to use, forcing you to move 10-20 coins out of the way before you can access the lower value ones, wasting Food and Water because the clock is still ticking. Kinda wish I could auto-sort them in stacks or something, so that I had easier time accessing whatever denomination I want.
- The coin collecting section is too boring (uneventful) and takes way too much time. I found myself watching YouTube while the game was playing in the background with sound disabled.
- The dialogue in the coin collection section does not change based on your appearance.
- There is no ending of any sort, at least as far as I have played. I got my girl to look like [spoiler]some sort of celestial white mask tree[/spoiler], but no matter how much I fed her after that, the game didn't seem to progress anywhere. It seems like I have reached the end of progression, but the game didn't notify me of this so I wasted a lot of time trying to progress further.
- There is really no point to the game as it is right now. The game loop is exactly the same no mater if you just started or played for many hours, all that changes is the girl's image. The world does not react to her changing, no new actions become available, no new scenes, nothing. There is no incentive to progress in the game, as progressing in the game doesn't do anything, aside from perhaps unlocking the Gallery.
- It's not very clear that the hamburger icon acts like a pause, so it would be made clearer. Perhaps add "PAUSED" in the middle of the screen while in the hamburger menu? Or change the icon from hamburger to a pause, and make menu items appear: "Back to title screen, Quit, etc."