I really enjoyed this demo! Have a bunch of thoughts/feedback... I hope it proves helpful or insightful. Will start with critique because they're less spoiler-y:
- The game renders at full resolution and then downscales, which wastes GPU power. (This is also true in Boundless Dreams, and does not help Mist World's performance... ^w^;) If you can manage it, it'd really be best to render at the low resolution in the first place. Performance wasn't an issue for me, but it probably would have lagged sometimes on my old 1050Ti.
- Lack of zoom on right click is a shame. Maybe it conflicts with some action I'm forgetting about, but nothing stops it from being bound to something else c:
- There's a delay when a new line of text starts until the player can mash through. It's pretty slow, and feels kinda clunky a little bad. I assume this was to prevent some bugs from spamming through text too fast for the animations, but for the full game hopefully you'll make it quicker at least!
- The smoothing on the camera is presumably fine for controller, but it feels pretty bad on keyboard & mouse. That your true facing angle for movement is independent of the smoothing doesn't help. If it's decoupled like that to prevent weird interpolation issues when spinning too fast, I'd imagine it wouldn't hurt too much to just tie movement to the smoothed version instead of the 'true' value, but the best thing to do would be to have an option to disable it.
- The low-health screen effects ramp up in intensity too quickly, I find, especially given that the game sometimes requires the player to walk through damage sources.
- I quite like the Oracle's design, although I feel like the pose of its portrait sprite is a little... gratuitous. It reads as kinda suggestive, when the character gives me the impression it'd be almost 'above' showing off in that way. It isn't a problem per se, like do whatever you want lol but it stuck out to me. I don't love it. But I felt similarly (and more strongly) about Forest World, so, my opinion is likely fairly irrelevant vs. the actual target audience for this particular element.
- The swimming speed is pretty slow. Personally I noticed it but didn't get bothered by it, but a friend is turned off by it a fair amount. Speeding it up would have consequences for existing level design, but I feel they'd be pretty minor - a rebalance of drown speed would probably be all that's needed?
- It feels off to play as Gogi, and in the first real dream you intentionally betray the orders and trust of the NPCs by worsening their situation (until it randomly gets better at the end). It totally works as a comedy beat, it's just a very weird one to give to this particular character. That Gogi inhabits an avatar of sorts for the levels means there's probably a decent excuse (and perhaps that's the intent with it already!), but as is I don't think the potential behaviour implications of that are emphasized enough to come across that way.
- Picking up blocks is a fine gameplay element but I wish it obstructed the screen less >w>
But yeah, great overall! I adore the dream factory and how it feels so cohesive with the Ethereal Crux from Boundless Dreams; the first level is very good (if a little lengthy for my tastes, but not by a ton); I love the glimpses we're given at some expanded worldbuilding. Understanding Gogi's role better, and fleshing out the aesthetics of the dreamscape... In particular, I appreciate that it seemed to be suggested that the dreamscape is not just one person's dreams, which was a question I had after playing Boundless Dreams. The writing in general definitely feels like a step up, to memory, as well - dialogue felt pretty consistently charming and interesting, whereas Boundless Dreams tended to have some transparently mechanical writing at times. c: (just a demo though, so I guess I dunno.)
Most importantly: Hypnagogia had a twisty hallway in School Dream. Hypnagogia 2 had twisty hallways in Forest World and Haunted World. Therefore, Hypnagogia 1.5 needs 1.5 twisty hallways to complete the trilogy