Mom

INTRODUCTION
I had highly expectations of this game due to the beauty of graphics and the promising plot it offered. I hoped this game could be a bit unique from the usual rpg maker games- not.
This title really hit me in the face, hard, in a bad way.

PLOT
I must admit I liked the simplicity of the story-telling and overall plot. We have a departed mom (although it was clear the moment we played) trying to save her little baby from Satan. We can tell from the small dialogues that she's been protecting her child for a long time now, and yet she doesn't give up, not even in the afterlife. I almost teared up, because how many times do we thank our mom, or tell her we love her?
It's probably one of the best things along with... the graphic.

GRAPHICS
From the screens provided I expected a painting-like game with interesting mechanics and visuals.
When I was greeted with the pixel part... I can't say I wasn't very disappointed and even betrayed from a player's pov.
As an artist myself, I could see the jumping quality between the two and how bad they clashed. Mind you, it could have been intentional and I can see that after all, but what I'm saying is the "monochrome" world is WAY too detailed compared to the pixel and "normal" one. Hence the "quality jump" (Or decline in this case?).
Despite this, I really, really enjoyed the visuals and LOVED the titlescreen image. The enemies sprite in-battle? Wonderful. I stared at them a long time before fighting each one. Everything built-up that creepy and eerie atmosphere typical of horrors, good job!

GAMEPLAY
Gameplay is hard, I know that myself for my own games. And yet, I feel this game could have been polished up better if it had a solid gameplay fundament.
The item-fetching quest at the start of the game wasn't bad, I kinda liked it, but the timer set at 5 minutes is way too much for me. Even with choosing to fast-forward I still felt I was wasting my time. A timer of 3 minutes could have been better.
The battles themselves were almost a joke. I don't know what happens if you don't get all of them, but once you know which item goes with which enemy It's hard to define them as "battles". You use the item and then deliver the punch.
A good way to keep the player entertained and make the battles engaging was to make them longer, maybe even let the Mom learn skills in some way (for example, reading from books about certain spirits).
All in all it wasn't too bad, but culd have been even better.

MUSIC&SOUND
All music and sounds go rather well with the game's themes and situations, building up what kind of feeling the player was "supposed to" have in certain moments. Nothing much to say on this, they fit overall.

CONCLUSION
I feel sorry for giving this game such a low-score, especially because of its graphics and plot which were great, but I felt betrayed by its presentation expecting a greater game.
It was rather misleading especially on the gameplay part and I didn't like that. I actually hope to see more work from the author soon though, because I feel with their artistic skills I've seen from "Mom" they could do even better than this.