Look at that—we’ve got another GameMaker user here haha, what an honor!
Your game’s art direction is really beautiful. It’s definitely one of its strongest aspects. The colors do a great job of conveying the atmosphere of the environment while also creating a pleasant vibe, staying nicely in harmony with both the gameplay and the “mini story.”
If I may offer a suggestion about the menu: instead of having separate buttons for windowed mode and fullscreen mode, it would be cleaner to have just a single “Fullscreen” option with an indicator showing whether it’s on or off. That would make the menu feel more streamlined and organized, since you’d only have one option handling that. A global variable would easily take care of this small detail.
Something else I noticed is that when selecting options with the mouse, the input feels very fast and can affect multiple menu layers at once. For example, if there were a “Back” button in three different sections positioned in the same spot, clicking it might take you back three layers instead of just one, which I assume wasn’t the intention. A simple delay variable could help control this interaction—something like half a second would probably be enough. At least, that’s my assumption of what’s happening, though it’s also possible you intentionally set it up so that selecting “Back” in, say, the audio menu returns to general settings first, then lets the player choose sections again before going back into audio/video.
As for gameplay, I think a short tutorial would really help players understand the mechanics and lock them in early on. In its current state, it does become clear after playing for a bit, but it would be great if players could grasp it right from the beginning and better appreciate your game.
Overall, it’s a great submission for the jam. I’m really happy to see another GameMaker dev, since almost everyone seems to be using Godot or Unity haha. Congrats on the game, and I wish you the best of luck in the jam!