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I just binged the entirety of the game so far, and I had such a blast with it. It was so interesting inserting a detective OC I already had into the story and figuring out how he'd interact with and feel about the different situations that happen in the game. This is definitely the kind of game that I'd recommend to other friends who have or like detective characters in fandoms and stuff. It really lets you live out your role playing dreams. The scenes where the main character just loses themself to their emotions, whether that be punching a shitty coworker in the face, or finally breaking down in the kitchen, or hugging their siblings tightly or having small moments of vulnerability with people they care deeply about... it's very humanizing, and I'm very intrigued by the development of it. It kind of makes me want to make a Twine text game myself.

I've checked your blogs and I've seen that neither of them have updated since 2023. I hope you're doing okay, health-wise and life-wise. If you're still there, please take care of yourself, because ultimately your health is important even if I would like to see this updated soon in the future. Take care.

Interesting concept but kind of confusing for someone just getting into it. It's difficult to tell what resources you need to get more resources, so you end up spamming each of them until you figure out which ties into which. It'd probably help to have some kind of indicator as to what resources each of them gives and which resources they need to be used.

I'm not a massive fan on the automatic system as it currently is. Having a lot of things going on at the same time kind of strains the eyes, and with how quickly the basics go, it leaves little room for me to actually settle down and read the lore as it goes along because I'm so focused on trying not to waste the resources available to me. I didn't even notice that there was lore until I got to the bugs, and even after that, I was so focused on trying to figure out what resources go to which action and keeping up with what I have that I couldn't find any time to read up on it.

It might be a good idea to implement automation when you click on something even if you don't currently have the resources for it. That way you'll be able to do the action once you do have enough resources available to you, and you can focus on other things in the meantime. On the other hand, having automation for basic resources (clawing shadows, water, etc) that automatically toggled off once it was full would also be a benefit. As it stands, having so many things be practically instant seems rather unbalanced.

Speaking of unbalanced, every single one of the upgrades is near instant for every upgrade. You can basically leave it going for half a minute and get 100+ extra units to anything as soon as you unlock it. It looks like if you do actions while you're upgrading, it also maxes out the resource that it gives you. I've been leaving all of the upgrades on while writing this, and coming back to this part, everything's 2000+ units. It doesn't feel intentional at all. I feel like each upgrade level should take a little longer to get. Level 1 can be fast and level 10 can take a while longer, scale it up, et cetera.

For some reason, I managed to find a glitch where while I was upgrading everything, Drinking the Dark Water toggles the Dark Water resource between a low percentage (like, 12%) and 100%? I have no idea what's up with this. It's also happening to Dark Water when Collecting Beetles, too.

It looks like when the upgrades are ridiculously maxed out, refreshing any resource to 100% is just a matter of clicking on it once. I don't know.

Uhh yeah it's a lot. I think it'd be nice if the pacing of the game were a little slower in some regards. The reward of the game seems like it's trying to be rewarding nuggets of the story, and it's just not coming across very well as it currently stands. As it is, this is a game that you can basically reach the end of in about 5 minutes or so.

I also just noticed the tutorial tab. After clicking on it, it is kind of hard to read. The text over the resources side is rather faded and the one on the right side's hard to make out through the action icons. I'd recommend putting an overlay under the text with a higher opacity to help it stand out more.

I'm bringing these up in the hopes that this can help you find issues in your game and improve them. For what it's worth, I do like the art that you use for the icons and for the actions. What little I did see of the story looked like it has an interesting vibe to it even if I didn't see much of it. I also liked how the resources showed up as you got your first bit of it.

Neat little game. Good luck on the Game Jam!

This isn't really that bad, all things considered. It's slow, but considering it's a demo and you don't intend to make anything big out of it, I'd say it's pretty good.  You did a great job with recreating the environment of Hollow Knight in a 3D space, and the atmosphere that you made for it was also very well-done. The music and the tone fits in well with each other.

Some small things that I found a little bit cumbersome about it is how the character bumps into objects and stops moving entirely. I think it would've been better to have let the character slide off of them rather than completely break momentum. Another thing that bothered me was how slow the attack button was--I think having a shorter cooldown time would be a great idea.

The camera was a little iffy to me at first, but I quickly got pretty used to it--the set angle that it's at is a really neat nod to the original game only remaining 2D, and I feel like it fits the scene pretty well.

The models also look pretty good, too--as does the environment. It doesn't look like the elements were taken directly from Hollow Knight--it looks like they were hand-made in a 3D software, and that little bit of effort is super neat.