Hey AhhGamesI played the game, and really enjoyed it, thank you for sharing,
I have recorded the playthrough where i speak out loud, and that should give you a few pointers on where I struggled with the game, and where I enjoyed the game.
I am using AI to capture the feedback in text form (there is still some work to do on shaping this skill :) )
Here is the AI summary
Japitown playtest, my notes
Hi Alan, thanks for putting this out and for inviting feedback. I went in cold (didn't read the page first) and played a single ~13 minute session as a think-aloud test. Quick framing: I'm not the target audience for visual novels (I'm more of a French/Belgian comics reader and I don't usually play story-driven games), so take that into account, but I genuinely enjoyed the session more than I expected. The art and the opening scene with Papa carried it. Most of my friction was onboarding: figuring out what the game is, who these people are, and what I'm supposed to be doing in any given scene.
What I liked
- The line art is the standout. Clean outlines, expressive, very alive. It's the first thing I noticed and the reason I wanted to keep going.
- The Papa goodbye scene genuinely landed. I have kids around that age and the "smile and be happy when all you want is to hear them say I love you" beat is a real feeling. If you can hold that emotional precision through the rest of the writing, you have a real anchor.
- Reading-wise it has the cadence of a graphic novel I'd want to keep going with. The framing of the panels and the dialogue rhythm work for me even as someone outside the usual VN audience.
- The premise (returning home, rebuilding relationships with people whose dynamic has changed) is a strong hook on paper, even where the specifics didn't land for me in-session.
Where I got stuck
- I never understood who the people in the house were. I figured out Papa, and I figured out I'd been away traveling. But once I arrived at Mónica's house I couldn't have told you the names or the relationships. I literally said out loud "I want to reconnect with everyone, but I don't know still who they are." For a relationship-driven game that's the foundational layer and it wasn't there for me. Onboarding/learning issue, not difficulty.
- Nothing tells me what's clickable in a scene. In the very first Papa scene I sat there clicking around trying to find the interaction. The cursor turns into a hand on basically everything, so the cursor isn't signal. I get that the bed and backpack icons later are the navigation/action menu, but in dialogue scenes I couldn't always tell whether I needed to click the character, click somewhere on the panel, or wait.
- The day/time system wasn't legible to me. I hit "too late for activities," the inventory was empty, the chat and relations panels closed when I clicked them, and I genuinely didn't know if I was stuck or just done for the day. I ended up clicking the bed because I'd run out of guesses. I now understand from your page that there are 4 time slots and characters move around the house autonomously, but none of that was visible to me as a player.
- The "skip" button and several UI affordances are unlabeled. I couldn't tell what skip would skip, and several panels (chat, relations, map) gave no real explanation of what they were for. The "map content in development" placeholder is fine for early access, but the live ones could use a one-line description.
- A few smaller bugs / polish notes from the session: the dialogue switched to Spanish at one point ("nada" type lines mid-sentence), at least one character kept smiling through dialogue where the emotional beat read as sad or angry, and the backpack contents seemed to change between a scene and the next in a way I couldn't trace.
- I didn't pick up on the adult/romance framing during the session. I see now from the page that romance and 18+ content is core to what this is. From the playthrough alone, I read it as a relationship-drama story game. Not a complaint, more a flag that the in-game tone in the early scenes doesn't telegraph what kind of game I'm in. That might be intentional pacing and that's fine.
Suggestions
- The tutorial that's already on your 0.1.5 roadmap would have solved most of my problems. I'd push it earlier if you can. Even a one-screen "here's the time system, here's your phone, here are the people you live with" would change the first session a lot.
- Introduce the household by name and relationship on first contact. A single line per character ("Violet, Mónica's daughter, the quieter twin") the first time I see them would have grounded me. Right now I'm meeting people whose role I'm supposed to infer.
- Make the time-of-day state explicit and tell me what to do when nothing is available. A small persistent indicator ("Evening, slot 3 of 4") plus a nudge when all options are exhausted ("nothing more to do tonight, sleep to continue") would have stopped me from clicking around lost.
- For dialogue scenes, consider a subtle highlight on the thing the player needs to click to advance. The hand cursor isn't doing enough work on its own.
- Audit the scenes for expression/dialogue mismatches. The art is strong enough that when a smile holds through a sad line, it really pulls me out. Worth a sweep.
- On the AI disclosure: you've been transparent about it on the page, which I respect. The art holds up, the line work doesn't read as generic to me. Where it shows is mostly in small inconsistencies (a background detail here, a character expression that doesn't track the line there). Those are the things to keep hand-editing.
Overall
Genuine compliment first: there's something here. The art is good, the opening scene is emotionally real, and the premise has room to grow into the relationship system you're describing on the roadmap. For an Early Access 0.1, the foundation is more solid than I expected. The single highest-leverage thing you can do, in my view, is the onboarding layer: make the time system, the household, and the basic interactions legible in the first 5 minutes. The story bits are working. The interface is in their way.
Good luck with the development. Hope the feedback is useful.