thanks for playing(and leaving such a detailed review)!!!
Because of the effort you spent on the review, I will try to match my effort on response lol. So here it is:
I’m glad you liked the starting screen twist. During my development, the game felt really generic, and I was afraid my creativity score is going to get dropped a bit. Hopefully the surprise factor could help me :D
I 100% agree with your opinion about puzzle/mystery game. In the start, I was really focused on making all the gameplay I failed to balance out any hints haha. In my playtesting phase, I think only 1/3 players got an ending after 10 minutes. In order to make the game more appealing to a game jam, I tried to make it so that players can at least get an ending at their first/second loop. I did overdo it a little bit though—I should have added a difficulty selection button.
My design document for the narrative is extremely simple lol. I started off with the ending(idk why but my brain went to the ending first), and just thought about some key parts. Then I just wrote what I thought of in the game’s articles itself, haha.
In the playtesting phase, I did receive a review suggesting changes to texts in the background. However… I got too focused on testing other developers’ games I forgot about my own game haha. The ui can definitely be improved.
I thought some voice acting for the audio would be nice; however, my own voice is just…a bit unlistenable so I scrapped the idea.
Thanks again!