Well, I gave it some time and finished the demo, and I can see a lot of work went into it, but the gameplay was kinda frustrating. At least I could skip reading the instructions in the second case. I HATE learning board game rules, that's why I play PC games instead, goddamnit! :)
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I think the main problem is that I’m not very much into reading a lot of English text, which is basically the core of your game :) I believe that if I were a native English speaker, it would be much more comfortable for me to play it.
For example, during the first case I flipped through the story book, got scared by the number of pages, closed it, and then tried to get up from the table and do something else or go somewhere, before I realized it was actually my task to read the book and solve the riddle inside. In the end, this task was quite fun, but a simple instruction like “Read the story book and put your solution on the last page” instead of just “Click on the story book to read it” would probably do the job and spare me a minute of furious clicking :)
In the second case, I was really glad that you have the option to skip the board game puzzle, but I had to confirm it like three times, aargh! :D I also appreciate the option to show all the hotspots, that’s very helpful. But you introduce the system of working with tabs like tasks, notes, events, and some screenshot feature, and I didn’t want to try to understand any new concepts, I just wanted to solve the case. Once I learned how it works, it was OK to play, but all this could be more… intuitive? Or maybe the second case could work as a tutorial, guiding me through every screen and showing all these concepts one by one?
During the third case, I closed the game multiple times and seriously considered not continuing and I always only tried once more because I didn’t want to give up. There was a lot of dialogue and newspaper reading, which felt overwhelming for me at that point. Why does the game not accept the name “Ellie Scott” when I already know it from the beginning? (Yeah, because I wasn’t reading the texts carefully, I know, but…) And realizing the last newspaper keyword to find the hospital article was also painful. None of the three hints assigned to it helped me, so maybe it would be worth reviewing the hint system and making the last hint a clear solution?
You know, these are just ideas, I’m not sure how helpful they actually are. You should definitely collect feedback from other players too. Maybe I’m just not the target audience for this kind of game and my frustration says more about my personal preferences than about the quality of your game :) Don’t give up!