Okay I played your game
-the menu icon in middle of screen? didn't figure out how to get it to go away but I was able to ignore it after an hour or so
-default control has 'e' for pagedn but not 'q' for pageup? not a huge problem since I can rebind to add it back.
-i really hope some people find the mindless collecting and energy restoration fun
-you can light the campfire, then open the cook menu, but if you leave it just disappears and you can't rest even if you cook NOTHING (ie: just started the game and are trying to look at your options)
-"I will let you keep the resources you have gathered today, as a thank you for the shard." -> are you kidding me? What? Are you serious? This game has a pyramid scheme as its limited plot/lore? Man, I can't remember a tutorial teacher/tutor that I started to hate from the very beginning. And I'm not sure this was intentional at all. If it was, then you've done a good job but it feels odd to turn the player against Jessa so early.
-IMPORTANT: catching a bug (from a tree minigame interaction) crashed the game. Image file did not load and i didnt bother replacing it with something else to retry because of autosave. This is bad, and is an easy fix (obviously). Unclear if this affects other bugs caught in other situations. Unfortunately I have no idea which bug tree I interacted with to get this crash and I didn't interact with any of them for the next hour, either.
-basement ("father's basement?") seems to use same dialogue regardless of character. Probably not good (dialogue seems to be for the opening where you control Jessa?)
-location of at least one of these signposts is pretty silly (like 1-2 tiles too high). Basically you can't walk up to it and talk to it from the front, only the sides. The event is probably just one tile too high or something. Not a huge deal, I guess.
-can walk on roof of Mia Harthwood's shop (exterior, the orange one)
-lots of places you can just walk up the walls of the cliffside (ie: from the vertical log bench across the fire pit from Thaden Stoneseeker, just hold UP and you will scale the stone wall up to the upper level. Other places nearby can be walked into but this one, while potentially interesting or useful like a clever shortcut which imo would be good in games like these, but this feels like a typical RPG Maker mapping oversight)
-apple tree needs Direction Fix or something ticked. When you talk to it from the North, East, or South directions it morphs into one of you other trees.
-the 10 gold travel guy on horse feels kind of annoying when a first time player does not know the names of almost any location, even after 70+ minutes of play. Thankfully you have some gold to work with, but when you are lost, he does not help -- he may make navigation even more confusing. It is helpful only to people who already know the layout fairly well and have a good idea of where they are going. For everyone else, it punishes you by sucking up gold and dropping you off in a place you probably aren't familiar with.
-moving NORTH to reach the oceanside (starting area?) is fine, i guess, but it is very confusing and unintuitive. When you leave the oceanside, you are now facing down and obscured by trees, very close to the transfer point back to the oceanside. This kind of stuff is not just a pet peeve of mine -- it reeks of awful/sloppy rpg maker map control.
-unclear if there is a reason for being unable to interact with other campfires. Also odd that the first one I found coincidentally had it start raining (which did not put out the unattended campfire either).
-unclear what to do after Ren seemed to just drop you off in a town (although I talked to her a couple of times in the town). -> says "I should speak with Ren and get my companion, before going inside to look at items and training for my slime." -> this happened while I had a slime companion (I walked back to the oceanside to use the 25 cores (26 because you have to give one to Jessa for some reason, so she only needed to collect 24 apparently)
-the dialogue for ALMOST everything (at this point) seems to suggest Jessa is the person talking... not my character. I don't know where Jessa went. Was she originally the main character? I guess she was, maybe that much is obvious. Anyway it's probably better this way, but I wouldn't want to have to look through all of those npc and misc object interactions to fix them, so good luck doing that because it's a lot of work.
-found a slime guy with the same looking pink slime as me, and tried a battle. My slime did 0 damage with every hit as I watched it lose -5 or -7 very slowly until it died. Unclear if this is intentional, but I wouldn't expect to win my first pokemon battle. Actually wait, no, I would expect to win my first one, now that I think about it. Hmm... anyway -> i know i can turn up the battle speed but I left it on default for this first awful experience. I'm not sure what kind of person would think "Hmm that was really hard. I really want to train up my slime to try again and beat him next time!" unless you were a child, and could time travel back to the mid to late 90's.
-why is there a green loading bar for using the mortar & pestle? Does slowing down the crafting really improve the immersion for people? I guess it does. Like there is work put into the sound effects and timing, so this must be intentional, but jeez... I'm tired just thinking about doing this more than once or twice in a full playthrough.
-i realize this is probably a common crafting plugin or something but I really can't believe my eyes trying to use it. Perhaps I just haven't played enough Atelier or whatever game people love doing this stuff in, but I have very few good words to say about the crafting UI at the moment other than I haven't noticed it fail to give me an item it said it would, which means it is working as intended so far.
-> okay nevermind. As soon as I wrote that, I tried to make Dough with Water + Flour + Wheat + Sugar and the result was 2x Flour. Thankfully I had enough wheat to try again and put it in the right order or whatever, but this kind of thing is a huge pain point unless the player is already invested heavily into the game and willing to jump through monotonous hoops. Or perhaps there are people who actually like this type of artificial inconvenience, so I'll just have to hold my judgement there.
-unclear why it says Press Enter to finish when any normal person would press whatever action button they've been playing the game with. No need for additional dissonance with that type of message.
-are.. are all of the minigames random?
-found a uh, cooking tutorial. She is charging me 25 actual gold for each lesson, but presumably you have to do this at some point. In virtually any game where the goal is the completion of all of these tasks, I'm willing to put up with this so it's fine, I suppose. Still seems extremely strange how much your bank account is removed to learn how to bake bread or whatever. That's the part I got stuck on (ran out of money). At least you get to keep the cooking materials, but at least at this point I'm afraid of wasting them while I'm potentially in the middle of a tutorial. So now I have to save up 25 more gold (or 50, or 75, how much?) for the next step (or two, or three, etc) and there's no guarantee that I'll be free of the tutorial requirements with potentially limited resources at this extremely early stage of the game. So it's very unclear how to proceed here other than just hope for the best and just forget everything and go do something else (in the game, I don't mean quit, at least yet anyway).
-found the first hunt, my own slime did 0 damage to it with every hit, and my character (Jerek, or maybe he is Jessa now? Or maybe he was Jessa but is now Jarek? I don't want to deadname so I guess They/Them is what we are now)
-> main character, Them, did all the work but that was a successful battle at approx 2:03 game time. On par with Dragon Quest VII's remake thereabouts for reaching the first battle screen. Not the same kind of game, but the original DQ7 has the longest time period before your first battle of any game I've played (just shy of three hours before your first battle for a regular person, playing blind).
-upon further analysis, it seems like all of the incorrect pathing locations can be seen on the minimap. Like if you just look at it you can easily tell where all of the collision/tile errors are using the in-game minimap
-IMPORTANT: game locked up at 5:30 AM, Year 1 Spring 3 WED. Entering (presumably) towards Falcon's Crown from a signpost that said Falcon's Crown was to the west (even though I came from the lake from the north...), so I tried to skip the lake which I just came from and go to this new falcon's crown to the west. Jarek/Jessa/They/Them had a big question mark icon and then autowalked into a tree and the game is stuck. This might be where my Journey ends.
Never found Ren. Probably my fault for not reading the dialogue more carefully, but at the time my mind was struggling to adjust to these MASSIVE new maps and towns and buildings AND named characters, all the while feeling like I was misled and had my Companion Cube, err Companion C-whatever stolen from me. I had 26 cores but the game had Jessa get her slime and instead of letting me put in and get my slime, too (which I had farmed up before going into the cave with the cool door animation, obviously), but she... she decided that her needs were all that mattered. So we both go all the way to the town and I've been lost ever since (well, only sort of. I did get back to the oceanside and get a companion, and do a one star hunt). And failed to make some Dough, but tried again and made some Flour. That was my experience.
Overall I think I'll give this game a 5/7, a perfect score. Pretty fun if you like this kind of thing and very impressive use of the artwork for a nice-looking collecting/crafting pseudo-survival game with monster raising or whatever.