'Witch Trap' is a slice-of-life, romance, comedy, mystery story. Got to point out that this one is one of those 'first-act' submissions where it spends the time setting up the characters and the premise, and leave us on a cliff-hanger right when the plot is about to start. I think it's supposed to be a a fun riff on spooky shows like Scooby Doo, the Ghost Stories anime, and adding in an element of Among Us.
The story is fairly simple, a group of four college aged friends decide to sneak into the school campus to perform a test of courage/ritual of friendship, cause one of them just wants to do it. The main character is gay for one of his friends, but is kind of developing a crush on the other friend. There's a lot of talking and banter, and then they do the ritual, and oh no, turns out it was a trap (the Witch Trap), and one of them is actually not who they say they are and is going to eat the other 3 if they don't figure out who it is. Then it 'to be continues'. It's actually a really fun premise for a visual novel, one that we've seen before in mystery genres, a story about deception and figuring out who is the traitor/murderer/witch. That being said, the characters aren't particularly interesting off the bat. I think they're supposed to be archetypes of the jock, the nerd, the slacker, and the girl, but they're all pretty muted as far as personality goes, and the motivations for these characters are very flimsy at best. It feels like this might have been envisioned with middle or high school aged characters based on how immature and tropey the seem to act. It could work with that age bracket if you keep it PG-13. Structure wise, it's weird that we immediately get a full backstory dump from Marcus about how he's blind in one eye, and also always carries around an umbrella, and yet we don't know anything about the main character, or anyone else. Like, I guess he's important to be the love interest, but the whole intro goes on about how the main character is into the jock, Luiz. The plot feels a bit unfocused and not sure what to do with these characters.
The presentation has some strong points and some weak points, that's how I'd describe it. The art for the sprites is fine, it seems to get the personality of the characters across, though the way some of the important details like the blind eye I had to really squint to see it. Also be careful about flipping sprites that have asymmetry. That's also the other thing about this game, the visuals are really dark. Like I get that it's supposed to be at night, but everything is shaded with this dark blue, but you can't really see anything, it's almost as if we were in the void. I'd suggest instead shading with a really saturated blue or purple, rather than just going dark. That way you still convey the darkness without it literally having to be dark. I will say it was neat when the blinking eye animation popped in, and the big 'jump scare' moment of all the characters shaking. Though one detail of the room bobbing up and down as if you're walking the hallway did kind of give a bit of motion sickness. The CG is nice when they're under the umbrella too. The writing was not as strong as the visuals. There's a lot of weird sentence structures and word choices for the characters. The dialog comes across a bit stilted and awkward, like the characters are trying to be quippy, but don't actually say anything. The worst thing I would say is that the text really drags and is filler basically. Several points and details get repeated, but not even for importance sake, just because it seems that the characters don't have much else to contribute to the conversation. Try to keep in mind, that each line should have some kind of purpose to it: Giving insight into a character's personality or motivations, Moving the plot along, or By being an amusing thing to describe. The other thing, is if the crux of your story is the witch trap mystery plot, why does it seem to take so long to get to it? Why are we starting at the end of the school day, when we could just start at the meeting outside the school at night? Why are we missing chalk and then spending time walking through the dark school alone to get it? This much time shouldn't really be spent on ambience when we're only getting the thoughts from the main character about it. Why are we making jokes in our head when we could be making them to the other characters?
The folklore aspect is a bit weakly portrayed as well. There's talk of a witch, and a spell book, but it's never established why they got the book, or why they decided to do this ritual. I don't want to say this feels derivative, since everything is derivative, but it's hard for me to say that there's something about this story that helps it stand out from other whodunnit mysteries. Like, what do the characters gain by doing this? Are they doing research on the occult? Are they spooky enthusiasts? Is this a dare or challenge to join the spooky club? Are they just bored and looking for something to do? If so, why do they seem like they're being forced to do it?
I think this is a first time solo-dev-ing or working with a smaller team, so I'm assuming that this might have either been a lot of time constraints within the jam itself. It could also be a case of weird project management, where we have 1/3rd of the story for the initial friend banter, 1/3rd for Marcus' backstory, and a 1/3rd for being in the dark and doing the ritual. It makes me wonder if there was an outline on what the major beats of the story were going to be, and if you knew how to get to them. Was the plan always to just get to the end of act 1 and start the ritual, or was that just as far as was gotten done for the jam? I applaud the effort it took to get this much of a first build done for the jam, with all the asset creation and writing, but I feel like more time should have been done during the conception stage to get a good road map of this project.