Okay, so overall the atmosphere and world are honestly quite amazing, I really love the visuals and how the game actually plays. That brooding sound in the menu? Perfect. It immediately makes it feel like something heavy is coming and pulled me right back in to check it out. But man, the pacing at the start is rough-there's just not a lot happening for a long time, and the level design there is way too straightforward. You really need to break up that main path a bit. You're risking a lot with that slow burn; players might get bored and just drop it before the good stuff even starts.
Like, the bridge encounter is super scary, but dying there feels extra jarring because I pushed so far forward just to get sent all the way back to the very beginning. It feels kind of hopeless? Maybe add a side path on the bridge so the player can spot it fast and feel like they dodged death by a split second instead of just getting walled. Also, I was completely lost looking for the weapon. I literally went backwards and rummaged through the whole cart and couldn't find it. I only found that dirt path because one of the commenters mentioned it—otherwise, I never would’ve guessed it was there. You definitely need to leave some subtle hints for item placement, especially since it's randomized and you have to figure out the exact order of getting things just to make it through the bridge. Finding the dirt path, changes how you experience the whole game though. However, I still didn't manage to progress in it, despite knowing this.
It’s this weird, meta puzzle playing with standard gamer intuition-like realizing you shouldn't pick up the bullet right away because it triggers the monster. I actually really like that twist, and it heavily rewards a patient player (the sense of discovery is amazing once it clicks), but it’s super hard to pull off. If people struggle without any guidance, they can resign at any time and just quit.
So yeah, it’s an amazing game with a great core idea, just a little misguided right now regarding level design and player feedback. My final thought: if you can just figure out a way to organically teach the player that they need to actively look for those hidden paths, you're golden. Oh, and letting the player actually pick up the map would be huge, they'll still get lost just enough to be scared, but at least they'll know exactly how many POIs they have to sweep to get what they need to (maybe?) kill this thing. Just a few tweaks to the guidance and it'll be much nicer 🧛