Hi! I saw two pages of the Manga first, on Discord, and then decided to read the VN’s description and then I read the VN before reading the Manga. I already read the VN before typing this feedback, but I’m re-reading some of it to remind me of it so I can write more feedback.
One thing I often do with any video game I play is get to the main menu (or in some games, title screen) and listen to the music without pressing any buttons or keys. Some games just loop the music when it finishes, others do other things. I think for a VN it makes sense just to loop the music, but yeah, I listened to the whole track, and I liked it (yeah, VN music often needs to be reasonably simple so as not to distract from reading, but on the main menu it can do whatever it wants, especially after the first 20 seconds or so, not that the other music is boring, it’s just a bit more constrained, and yeah, the knocking-on-door ambiance would get boring if I just left it playing for a while, but I think that actually helps keep those scenes tense), and I thought I’d mention that.
And now that I’m talking about music I might as well mention that I also like the other music (the knocking-on-door music would be a bit boring to leave playing, but it’s only used for some short segments anyway, the other pieces seem pretty good).
I like the icons for “windowed” and “fullscreen” (took me a moment to realize the latter was a crystal ball though, maybe those icons could have switched to colour versions when hovered). And I think the text under the selected option helped me realize what those icons were for.
Clicking “about” shows that the VN was made with Ren’Py. I think that bit of text shows by default at the end of the about screen but you should be able to add paragraphs before it mentioning all the people that worked on the VN.
Once in the story, clicking the flashing broom does exactly what I’d expect (advances the story, same as clicking pretty much anywhere else, but it kinda wanted me to click on it, so I clicked there). The clickable things below the text have icons that I don’t think it’s very obvious what they do but they have tooltips, so I could see. And while I could figure out the ddecorations on the sides weren’t clickable, I think the piece of jewellery has the same size as the icons and is close enough to them that I hovered on it, but saw that no tooltip appeared. And yeah, I also tried clicking that, and, like I expected, it just advanced the story. (I guess it might be possible to move it just a tiny bit to the right, but it takes at most one click to learn that it’s just a decoration, so I wouldn’t worry about it.)
English is my third language, but I could probably have read through the the whole thing without a dictionary (I did look up words like wince and lackadaisical). But even if you’d provided an option (oops, I almost wrote “potion instead, ) that when enabled replaced rare words with more common synonyms I’m guessing I’d preferred reading the story the way it’s written (it’s probably also hard to determine what should and should not change when such an option is enabled, I could easily read the “Bella flutters down the hallway…” message, but I could imagine some people who speak less English than I do might find it harder).
The plants… it would have been nice to see images of the plants, but I guess adding backgrounds just for short bits of the story like that would have been a lot of extra backgrounds to draw, so I get why it wasn’t done. In fact, if I wanted more art, I’d probably have had the arms/hands of characters change for some of their expressions since that would probably cover more text, if that makes sense.
Like someone else who left some feedback here, I too liked that story within the story about Penelope the water mage. And I like that that bit gets some music that hasn’t played earlier in the story… And I first thought that music was just for the Penelope story, but then I heard it again later, fittingly triggered by the words “She’s gone?!” which because of the previous time the music played, now made me get sad and angry again…
Anyway, I think I’ve been writing enough feedback (including the paragraph after this one, which I actually wrote before writing most of the ones you’ve probably read by now if you’re reading the whole thing, sorry for the super long feedback) so I guess I’ll write one last aspect of the VN, the last thing, that is, the end credits. I like how each person’s work is shown when showing their name. And the whole thing automatically advances from slide to slide, and on the first readthrough I actually let it do that, but on the second one I tried to speed it up by clicking. Well, good thing the mouse cursor turns invisible to discourage people from trying to click on those QR codes as if they were links. (I’m sorta guessing the whole credits sequence is one animation, and yeah, I’m not sure it’s worth making it into a custom displayable just to be able to let the reader partially control how fast the names show.) And I tried timing the credits and it almost matched up with the length of the main menu music. I wonder if it was intended for that theme to play during the credits sequence so that the music would end at the same time as the credits.
I think the manga is nice to read all at once (assuming you know which of the characters is a witch, but I guess you can tell by looking at the cover page), but reading one page at a time possibly in the wrong order it doesn’t make much sense. I guess those manga/comics that are released a page at a time have stories written so that something interesting happens on pretty much every page. Or do like western comics and fit more panels per page. And yeah, if I were making a VN and a short manga/comic, I’d maybe make the latter a spin-off so that it doesn’t matter which order people read the two in. (I read the VN before the manga.)