Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 8! My name's Hythrain, a co-host and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!
So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.
I'll admit, I was looking forward to this. I was all ready to play it and get spooked. It'd been a while since I've had a good scare and I was hoping this would deliver.
Unfortunately, there were some issues that made this... well, impossible. The primary issue is that I'm on a potato computer. My video card is a GTX 1650 Super, and thus if a game is not well optimized then my video card can't handle it unless I'm not doing anything else; including streaming. This resulted in the game wanting 100% of my GPU while OBS was taking 25%, and has priority over that 25% to ensure my stream can't be interrupted. Thus did the framerate collapse. Movement became sluggish and I could feel the camera lag far behind the mouse.
In short, you really need to work on optimization and having graphical settings. To give you an idea of how bad it is, I usually expect this sort of issue from Unreal Engine games (as UE is difficult to optimize for), yet not a single UE game in this event has had the framerate issue this does. It's going to be crucial going forward to do this as there will be people who will not have top tier computers.
With that all said, I also want to discuss what seemed to be bugs to me that I dealt with. The first was after I got the red key from the corpse dealing with the reddest second degree burns. While I had the key and had already gotten the page from the far side before, I returned to the middle to go through the gate. However, the gate didn't open. I returned back in my attempts to find another route, and when I eventually returned to the gate it still wasn't opened. I then retreaded every single step in the entire game, encountering nothing new whatsoever, until I return to the reddest man. It was here that, for the first time, I heard him ask for help. When I returned to the gate, it was open.
Of course, my joy at being able to continue was short lived. I went in, through the door, was told to run, was teleported, began running as expected. Eventually my path took me to where a cutscene began to engage as a tower was zoomed in on... and this was where my playthrough ended. I was locked into that cutscene. I began writing this, and before I finished this paragraph I ended up giving the entire game another try; could not get past the gate again. So yea, pretty sure I had some harsh bugs or was missing something.
With that said, I don't want my feedback to be focused on technical only. I want to be able to give you feedback for the gameplay and the narrative. So here's what I feel I can give you for this.
You're calling this a psychological horror, but there's a question I have to ask in this: is it supposed to be scary for the player? If it is, then the methods you're going about it is at times a smart idea and at times a very bad idea. Let me start with the good. Using a dramatic sting every now and then out of no where can make the player tense, so lost as you don't do it too often and sometimes even make it actually pay off with the player seeing something should they look around. However, making use of near constant audio comprised of dramatic stings and music... is not a good idea. It kills the fear of the stings because they stop meaning anything and it's only going to be when the player knows something's significantly changed in the game that they'll even think about being scared. What I recommend is instead using more atmospheric sounds. Not just ambient horror sounds, but sounds of the forest or the lake carrying over. Make the use of music and stings be more restrained. The use of sounds is so important for psychological horror. Having the right balance of music, stings, horror ambience, natural ambience and especially silence can really help make players feel more tense. Tension is what makes it scary.
Speaking of tension and being scary, I found the current "cutscene" scares to just... not really work. Like, they're always in set position and always the exact same. So here's where I'm going to go back to something I said when talking about the sound: "sometimes even make it actually pay off with the player seeing something should they look around." Instead of making every single scare-scene be in the same spot, only use one to introduce the concept. Make it happen very early. From there, start occasionally having shadows in the trees be formed. Have the first one always appear on a sting to tell the player "sting = bad." This will help on tension. Also, because of the way these things happen, you also have an easy way to erase it. You can even have things appear more clearly before vanishing. Just make it less scripted. This will also build to the scares.
These two things together are how you get a scary psychological horror. You'll get in the player's head and make them nervous this way.
Of course, if you're more after a narrative psychological horror than a scary one, just ignore all this. :) In that scenario, I sadly can't see enough to give you more feedback.
Hope this helps! <3