This game was assigned to me as part of the feedback pairing form, and I wanted to get to it earlier but didn’t manage to. Finally played it today and I absolutely loved it! Great writing and storytelling done through interactive sections that tied in really well with the narrative and kept holding my attention constantly. It was especially cool that you managed to incorporate 3 different kinds of gameplays (sokoban, stealth and platformer) along with the other sidescroller/visual novel main section into one consolidated experience, which deserves really high praise in my opinion.
Loved the art as well, the different kinds of artstyles in the character portrait for the visual novel sections (felt inspired by JoJo), the sprites for the sidescroller section (reminded of older western cartoons), as well as the art for the interactive sections and cutscenes were all really expressive and soulful. Great work there, especially with how everything is still consistent and unified as a whole and fitted right in with each other. I especially liked the CEO guy’s representation in the Sokoban levels, it kinda borders on surrealism which I really like. Adding the various insult speech bubbles as obstacles in the platforming section was also a really nice touch.
My two issues were the lack of resolution settings so I couldn’t really place it on my screen properly, and it didn’t turn to fullscreen/borderless fullscreen either so it was a bit inconvenient, though I think people with smaller screens would get a part of the game cut off entirely for them. Thankfully that should be an easy fix. The other one is that the platforming section could do with a little more polish, especially with the hitboxes for various obstacles being actually larger than their sprites, so it was a bit frustrating to keep getting hit by them repeatedly, especially with the movement being kinda hard to control there.
Other than those two, I think this is an absolutely amazing piece of work! My favourite characters were E.R.I.C and the cat. Would love to see you guys expand on this concept to maybe include more episodes kinda like procedural detective shows? Maybe covering more of the world background, like what happened to the robots after their emancipation or who the collaborators with the dead CEO were who created the nefarious finger of command, and maybe other evil stuff they upto, maybe like weapons of mass destruction or mind controlling other humans with cybernetic interfaces? I think this could do really well as a cyberpunk techno-capitalist dystopian story. My best wishes to the entire team, well done! 💖