Oh, I just finished playing this. I was meaning to play it for a while!
The art for this game is so beautiful! I love the background art especially, and how much detail was put into
making it change/become corrupted as darker elements come into the forefront of the story. It was really well done, the change to the bedroom/tree were genuinely quite troubling!
To that end, some of the things in the game - the MC changing in the mirror, the mother's face in the bad end - actually made me jump haha XD It reinforced my ideas that VNs are a really good medium to write horror stories in, since you can use images/sfx to compliment your writing in a way that makes the horror more 'immersive'. They're more effective at scaring people than plain text is, I think.
It made me wanna write something with jumpscares too XD
Oh, and the music was really good too. It was atmospheric, suited the story perfectly, and never felt too repetative.
I suppose the story was a little similar to Dreaming Mary, with the cute critters and the dream world (it was probably unfortunate I played Dreaming Mary a week before I played this), but I think it's notably different. And lots of stories use dream worlds. I think it was the inclusion of the cute animals that made it seem so similar, combined with the fact they both have some puzzlesolving. But this story was
creepy in a different way, and was a little more undetstated than Mary. Since this story seemed to be focused around depression, not assault? It was also a lot vaguer than Dreaming Mary, and gave less details about the MC's life - which makes it more fun trying to think of theories o:
I really liked the puzzles, too. I don't usually like gameplay in VNs, but I enjoyed all the interactivity as it lent to the sense of exploration and being a part of the dream world yourself, as a player. The puzzles were also fun to put together. Maybe that's because they weren't hard, so they didn't slow down the narrative any, but they still required a certain amount of effort, so they didn't feel completely unecessary?
The art in the puzzles was nice, too : >
Maybe the story itself was a bit too sparse, but the gameplay itself was fun enough so I didn't mind too much. I enjoyed it, even if I don't know if I 100% understood what was going on?
Or why getting the locket was so very important? It wasn't really mentioned in any great detail, I think.
It would have been nice if the little animals had maybe a bit more personality, or you could converse with them slightly longer, since conversations might help the player understand the MC's personality/feelings a bit more, too? But I feel they were meant to be like a blank slate character...?
And, there were some bugs here and there - like text repeating itself in certain areas - or things that weren't 'bugs' but seemed a little strange, like being asked if you wanted to
use your magic powers on books when you had already extracted the required item from it
, but it wasn't anything major.
Overall, I liked it a lot n_n; You did a good job!
As a side note - I realised the GUI is the same as the GUI you used in Wounded By Words (which I have read but haven't left any feedback on yet. I should do that later n_n;;). Is there a reason why it's the same? o: Are the two stories linked somehow?