This was a great story, I really enjoyed it. It was well put together, and I think the plot twist was a great addition. Nothing felt cheesy or overdone, and it was an original and compelling story. It also felt very retro so I think it fits the theme well.
Overall the game was amazing, here are some suggestions for very slight improvements:
- If you change the label's "visible_character_behaviour" setting to "Characters After Shaping", text doesn't jump around as you add characters (e.g. if you're tweening the number of visible characters). For me this is slightly more readable and less jumpy
- Personally I would make the scrollbar a little thinner (just a style choice though)
- It would be nice if spacebar progressed the game when there was only one option available to choose from, and also if the "press spacebar to continue" button was clickable with the mouse
- There was one text character which didn't load for me - I believe that the itch server doesn't have a default fallback font, so you have to provide one yourself in the font import settings (e.g. google Noto has all characters I believe)
- There was one missing bbcode tag ending, in the text block that begins "This was Mary's favorite stuffed animal"
All that being said, these are very very very very minor problems. Overall this was an amazing experience, 10/10 from me. I really like being able to press space to speed up the text, thats a great idea. Also the sounds and artstyle were really nice. Just out of interest, how did you make the images? Compress real world photos and then add e.g. the ladder and the family photos over them?