Definitely one of the weirdest entries I’ve seen, lol.
Critique and Feedback: The level / world design is very fleshed out for a 3D entry at just under a week! There are small bugs here and there, but nothing that is overly distracting in terms of setup and game play. Let’s go through my run through:
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One of the first things I noticed when clicking on the menu was that the buttons required a double click. Not a huge issue, but definitely not a standard convention - most times, games’ buttons require a single click to access. Going back wasn’t immediately apparent either. Despite this, I do like seeing a well thought out menu put together, which this was.
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The loading screen took surprisingly long for such a short game - why does it take so long? I wasn’t sure if it was stuck there by mistake or not - consider putting a loading bar to show progress on your loading screens so users can judge between errors and slow loading times. That said, having a loading screen in the first place: props.
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Music and Sound: The music choices were great. Very subdued and light, perfect for background. The sound was another thing though - while I am happy you thought to include sound in the game, the choice of sounds became grating fairly quickly (“HMM??” every dialog box seems excessive). If you have non speech dialog sounds, it might be better to make something more subdued - a sound that could be played on a loop that simulates speech but that is not speech (think Charlie Brown adults with “Wa wa wa… Waaa waaaa”). That said, I appreciate that the different characters have distinct speech sounds - it shows that thought was put into it to make each character distinct.
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Character Design: Chef’s Kiss. I got a very Avenue Q vibe from the characters, and it was fantastic. I think this is probably my favorite part of this game.
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Gameplay: Absurd as advertised. I died frequently from the most absurd of things, and rightly so. The “It was all a dream” mechanic of coming back seems a bit cliche, especially given that I am waking up to continue progress that was in my dream, but I’ll take that as part of the surrealness of it all, and at any rate, it was well designed to continue play without frustrating the player. There are times that I felt that player handholding was a bit off - it wasn’t clear to me that the tools were in the van for instance, and I only learned about the backwards talking resident AFTER having died twice from him (and I think unjustifiably so, because even reading his words carefully, I think the second offer he makes was worded in such a way that my choices were correct… but oh well, this was honestly not too distracting or frustrating, since he was meant to confuse the player anyway).
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Story: I have a small gripe here - while the gameplay was well put together, the story was somewhat unclear - I had no clue why Jefferson was talking about marriage or talking, etc, and the dialog surrounding this seemed incoherent as well. It also seems to have nothing to do with the overall game, though I take that as this being a small, 1 week vertical slice in what could become a larger game in where this is made clear.
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Other notes: Some of the spelling was off, and there are some general polish issues (mostly in UX - it might help to have some more user facing help and hints like a visible way to identify when I can interact with something and a better explanation of controls), but overall, I think you had a fairly well put together thing here. Very well done!