Hi Synaut,
this is a very interesting piece of game design. It caught me from the very beginning and I played for almost two hours, which is well above my usual itch.io standard. Here’s a heap of my notes:
- At first I was worried about the CRT effect, because it usually hurts my eyes, but in your case it surprisingly works very well. No pain occurred and after a while I didn’t even notice it anymore.
- The mysterious characters are skillfully designed and all the secrets behind the game kept driving me forward. I really wanted to know what was going on. That’s a very powerful tool for keeping players engaged.
- I love the core concept, the atmosphere and the music, everything fits together perfectly.
- The tutorial felt well balanced. It introduced the basic gameplay concepts while still letting me discover a lot on my own.
- That said, at the very beginning there might have been slightly too many new mechanics introduced at once. It wasn’t overwhelming, but it did take me a moment to process everything.
- It is quite hard. I usually died on level 4, maybe once I reached level 5, but I wasn’t able to progress further. At that point I also didn’t see additional progress in uncovering the mystery, so I stopped playing.
- I found some bugs, which unfortunately appeared randomly and I have no idea how to reproduce them. Sometimes I had trouble switching to examine mode via right click. And after dying around the fourth time and restarting, I wasn’t able to place dominoes on the arm. I could move them there and back, but they wouldn’t snap into place.
That’s probably everything I wanted to mention. You have my deep respect for creating a game like this.