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'm feeling a bit torn here. On one hand, every jump scare in the game did get me. On the other hand, I know that the primary reason why was because of how loud the sound was compared to everything else going on. I know this because when I restarted the game after accidentally dropping the flashlight near the end (it disappeared into the ground), I began speeding through and when I just bolted for the letter explaining the breaker puzzle the jump scare there still got me a bit. However, if I muted the sound then none of the jump scares could get me.
There was certainly good build up at points, particularly after the first scare happened. The whole situation of having to clean up the trash kept me on edge as I was suspecting I would get a new scare during it, but this was never paid off. However, after that I didn't feel the tension was there anymore. Like, when I got through the bathroom part and started making my way back to my room, from a distance I could see the red light from room 3. At that point, I expected the next jump scare to be closer to it or even inside, thus I felt no tension when the second scare came along. Thus, much like the first scare, it got me for a moment but its effects didn't last. If anything, the feeling of my heart racing from the jump scare went away even faster than the first time.
That said, I find myself wishing this was a longer experience. Between two jumpscares happening at times when I wasn't expecting them, having more time in the game after that second one would've likely led me to become more tense and for it to remain as now the game had twice caught me off guard. I would've been more worried to do certain actions, like I was when it first came to going into room 3 as, just like with the trash, I was then trying to expect the scare and wondering when it would show up made me tense. A longer playtime would've also allowed for having more creepy stuff happen to unsettle the player and help make more build up, as well as to spread the jump scares out a bit more to allow each to have more room for tension build-up.
In short, it was good but I know it can be better.
One thing I would suggest is that when the player gets up for the first time and has to deal with the breaker, there should be a strange sound or something that appears at a distance for just a moment to push the player into a "Oh crap, stuff is happening" moment and thus to get the tension building in them. For me, I didn't feel any tension prior to the first scare, which has its own pros and cons (catches the player off guard but also doesn't affect them as long as a scare with build up would)
With all of this said, there are some notes I kept that I want to cover. I'll order these from smallest to biggest problems.
First, there's a typo when it comes to the note on the grave. It misspells the word "strange" as "starnge."
Second, I find it a bit weird that the button for picking up the flashlight is different from everything thing. I'd say don't worry about letting the player drop the flashlight and instead just have everything work on E.
Third, when I was reading the note I had it suddenly get pulled down from me. While there's a button command to say when to stop reading, it seems if you take too long then the game just boots you out of it.
Lastly, you absolutely need some optimization in this. Whenever I was facing towards the boarding houses, my GPU's usage would jump to 100% despite the low quality graphics at play. This wouldn't be a problem under normal conditions, but I'm both streaming and making use of a vtuber-like avatar. When any game starts demanding 100% of my GPU while my stream is going, there's always going to be problems as OBS is set up to always use the minimum amount it needs to operate smoothly. Some optimization will help correct this problem and, unlike Unreal Engine games, this should be a lot easier to manage.