PM'S PROFILE

author=emmych
Started the demo! About 5 minutes in, and I already have to say:

Take out the gasping/choking/crying/totally loli audio clips. It's weird. It's breaking me out of any kind of immersion and making me feel like this is gonna go down a total lolicon route, and I am super not into that.

Seriously: your game would be a million times better if she wasn't making those noises! Otherwise the audio and atmosphere is nice, but as is, I'm just headdesking at all the creepy gasps.

EDIT: Also, I've hit the end of the demo already! Brace yourselves: this may sound kind of blunt, but please understand I'm trying to be helpful and not mindlessly shitting on you.

I have to say, aside from the visuals, I'm not that impressed. What I saw is a really pretty "click everything until you find your next plot token" game, which all in all isn't interesting or fun! I dunno if your team is more story based than gameplay based, but personal I always try to look at a game and go, "if I didn't give two shits about the story, would this game be fun enough to keep on playing anyway?" As is, this feels like the kind of game that, if someone was interested in the story, they'd be rushing to get to the next cutscene and not enjoying what they were actually doing to get to that point. I would take a serious look at the game play and figure out a way to improve it. If it's about exploration, make it easier to explore! Open every door in that foggy room right off the bat, rather than forcing me to clonk my head against everything until I figure out how to open the next door. Get me to poke around things and find marbles, then make me arrange them in a specific, puzzle-y way. That's one route you could take, but there are any other number of paths that could improve the gameplay -- I would highly recommend exploring them!

Next part: I don't care about the main character, which, in a game like this, is a problem. Why should I care about protecting her from getting hurt? What are the consequences for me failing and getting a game over? There are none, so I hit the end and was like "welp guess that's over. That was a thing that I played." If I don't care about the MC not dying, why should I care about playing this game? What's to prevent me from recklessly going into the next room, even though a guillotine might chop lil MC's head off?

A great way to make the audience care would be to give her some personality, since she had none aside from "nice little girl". If I check a stool and all she says "This is a pretty stool", what was the point of clicking on the stool? What was the point of that dialogue if not to improve the atmosphere or show me more about her character? If you wanted to establish that there's nice furniture, why not have her say "Yeesh, this is some fancy shit for such a dingy place!", or "Golly this reminds me of my grandma's ottoman! She'd have a stroke if she saw a stool this nice get this dusty", or "This stool looks like it belongs to some bourgeoisie scum. *spits on oppressor class furniture*"? You can really easily insert personality using methods like this, and before the player knows it, they'll totally want to hug the crap outta your characters.

I guess the thing that is really irking me about the MC is that, because of the absence of a name and any kind of personality, she feels more like a body that these bad things are happening to for the viewers' titillation, rather than a fully fledged person in a scary situation. The loli-gasps really contribute to that image, so, again, I really urge you take them out or record some better ones (which it looks like you may be?). This makes the game take on a very creepy, predatory nature -- and I don't mean creepy in a "ooh, horror game chills!" kind of way, I mean creepy in a "this is rape-y as heck" way. That is not a good creepy! That is an objectifying and icky creepy.

Basically yeah I would really reconsider how you're framing this, since as is it's rubbing me the wrong way, and probably not in the way you folks intended. I'll certainly pop back in when the final release shows up to see if anything's different, and I may write a more concrete review then, depending on how everything turns out. I hope the rest of your development goes well!