itch.io

The art style is great--it's what originally drew my attention to the game. Telling the player the game is played with a mouse is also good. It communicates how the game is intended to be played so they don’t get confused.

I do wish there were more visuals during the explanation of the puppet performance in the beginning. I think it would draw in the player a bit more. Or maybe there could be a bit more scenes with Rainy going through her day-to-day life before getting to the library scene. A longer buildup of innocent and mundane dialogue could disarm the player and make the switch to Jonathan's perspective much more  jarring and memorable.

Filling in the blank does seem like a novel concept, and I was very interested in this mini game because my game also uses a similar mechanic at some point lol!  But I had trouble seeing why this mechanic was included. There doesn’t seem to be any punishment for putting in the wrong words, because the text just shakes. I want to see consequences for selecting the incorrect options and I want to see how selecting different options might affect the outcome of the game. 

There was a grammatical error in one of the fill in the blank segments: “I feel ___ because he ___ me. No one ever this ____ to me.” The last sentence here should be something like “No one has ever been this ____ to me,” or “No one was ever this ____ to me”. 

There were some other errors in grammar as well, like “whatever let’s just talk about firework”, instead of “whatever, let’s just talk about the fireworks festival”. It would be good to look over the dialogue to check the grammar again.

The music in the background with the rain SFX was initially pleasant to listen to, but the looping eventually became somewhat jarring to listen to over and over. My suggestion is to allow for moments of silence in between to let the player immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the game. I do like how the music changed when going from Rainy to Jonathan however.

Perhaps this is because the game is in development, but I wanted to see more dialogue choices.

Furthermore, I didn’t see an option to access the game settings after leaving the title screen to start the game. A player might want to adjust the resolution and sound after starting the game.

Additional settings might be separate SFX and music volume channels, text speed, and possibly keeping the text windows open for slow readers to reread dialogue. Also, to make the game accessible, there should be the option to play the game with the keyboard or a gamepad. Even if it’s just using the arrow keys and pressing enter for the keyboard, and then using the control stick and the select button for the gamepad, these additions will make the game playable for many more people. More options are good!

 Overall I enjoyed it,  and I think this game has great potential. There were portions when it was genuinely creepy. Perhaps including a few jumpscares (sparingly) would help keep the player on edge. Thank you for sharing this game and best of luck on your future endeavors!