This is another one that kind of came out of nowhere and blew me away!
It was actually longer or at least more involved than I thought. I was like "oh, this looks promising and it says it's short so I'll try it" and it took me an hour or two to get through it.
I also was not expecting the feels or the grimdark.
The storytelling was top-notch. The mix of walking around and point-and-click gameplay works well here, and telling a story in past tense via notes and objects worked great. The environments gave a lot of feel and emotion to the game just by the way they were designed.
I like how you showed us bits of the setting through small snippets and ambience rather than a huge infodump. I had enough context and understanding of the world to know what was going on, but without being bombarded with information.
I do wish you could review the notes, since you won't necessarily discover them in order. And I do agree with the previous commenter about it sometimes being hard to tell what can be interacted with.
The style of the backgrounds, combined with the postprocessing, gave the game a unique aesthetic that contributed to the tone and feel but it did start to get grating after a while. Sometimes I found it hard to see things because of the chromatic aberration and blockiness, and the environment could be hard to navigate because some of the areas look extremely similar.
It didn't really become a problem but if the game kept going I think it would start to be.
I think the puzzles are good but I found them very difficult. I don't think they are that difficult, but I don't typically play this kind of game. That's one of the downsides to jams; not everybody will be skilled at or into the genre of game you've made. I resorted to basically randomly guessing with the symbols puzzle and had a lot of trouble with the slide puzzle because I thought the star tiles needed to be in the spots indicated by the outlines. Someone with more puzzle game experience would be much more qualified than me to comment on these.
The game is teetering on the edge of needing save/load, length-wise.
I might have to give this one another playthrough once I've played all the other games in the jam. I still don't really understand the ending. Was that girl the other girl? Is she a vampire? The cheerful music kind of threw me for a loop here.
Overall it was a very good entry.