For my example, if I being left alone in your game room. The sound I would hear is the mechanical sound running around the room. (EX. Mechanical Room Study Sounds) It makes you become more immersive, disturb and make you thought running. Because you repeatedly hear only the static sound make you think a lot more than the music does. The downside of using soundtrack in horror game for me is it killing the nervousness of the player, but the good side is it make player flow to the game easily. It's depended on your design goal what you want player to feel.
A little thing that I struggle is the tutorial is way too long and lack of visual. For non-native speaker (like me), it pretty hard to follow up the words that it's explained. If it is a piece of note or email that would be fine. But I understand it might take too long to make additional work.
P.S. This is based on my experience you don't have to believe it all.
Hope you give it a try in your next project haha. Good luck! Sorry for my poor grammar ;(
Thank you for the reply that really clears up some things! Funny thing regarding the room noises, that was actually something that I had originally planned on doing, but it got pushed back due to time constraints. Something I actually do want to do in the future is do a full SFX pass on a ton of things since I didn't have time to implement them in the jam game version. Additionally, for the tutorial, that was another thing that I had to cut. If you remember the bulletin board in the office, you may have noticed that there weren't a lot of papers on it. There were three things in total: the controls, a poster giving you some tips for anomaly identification, and a newspaper with some story/lore. But I had actually planned on there being a lot more informative posters being displayed on the bulletin board.
One of the key things I had to cut out due to time constraints would have been unique visual posters for specific types of anomaly traits to look out for. I actually still have a reference image that I was going to use for what I had in mind (via a SCP Reddit post) that I never had the chance of using. I appreciate the detailed reply, this will go a long way in helping me out in the future :)
