The flashlight mechanic is good, I feel like the game would be too easy otherwise. Also, nice catch with the generator camp cheese where you turn on all of the lights at once. The addition of furniture adds variance to the rooms and makes them easily identifiable.
Some gripes:
-The creature itself is pretty lame once you realize it's a black devil with horns. A possible solution would be to keep the iconic red eyes, but remove the creature's model. The outside lighting would be almost totally removed to make what he looks like ambiguous. When he is at a certain camera, the feed becomes corrupted, which keeps his appearance a mystery. I would keep the iconic red eyes though. Maybe the player could see the creature when they get jumpscared?
-The ending is lackluster and unassuming. I'm not sure what you could add to improve this, but just add something.
Viewing post in RURAL BLACKOUT - Day 2 comments
Those are pretty good suggestions, I was actually thinking about a lot of those when I was working on it but just couldn't get them all in the 20 hours. The room identification and cheesing methods I tried to counter with the furniture, brownout mechanic and flashlight and I think solved it pretty well. I was thinking about trying to find an 096 model I could freely repurpose to sculpt and recolor since the body proportions are pretty unnerving, but I didn't have the time for it. The ending I admittingly didn't see until halfway through the Game Jam, but it could be more satisfying (like for example if a car outside the house starts up and drives over the camera perspective, switching to the menu once the wheel goes over in a kind of actiony way). Thanks for all the consideration though!