The gameplay is functional but fairly generic. No real puzzles or anything to speak of and the combat is just mashing the attack button. It feels like the skeleton of what could be an interesting horror game - what meat is there gets the job done, but there's not a lot of it. The pacing is good though, other than the battles dragging on a bit longer than they should. Unfortunately, the theme feels underutilized - there is indeed a "jewel", but there isn't really a "curse" to it other than "people are greedy". Numerically, I think it's a 2 all around (except a 1 for Theme). Not excellent but I think it could be good with more polish and fleshing out.

This game really had potential when it came to its premise. Getting stuck in a snowstorm is an underused in horror games, despite it being a great setting.

However, the game didn't really take advantage of it. For one, while it says there's a snowstorm outside and it's very cold, the game doesn't make it look like that at all. At the very least, the default snowing weather effect, maybe limited visibility and a background sound effect would work wonders here. And then there was the gameplay, which mostly consisted of random wolf battles and one bear battle, where the protagonist triumphs by repeatedly punching them. It just broke immersion and whatever atmosphere you've succeeded in building was lost as a result.

Also, several graphical effects on the map were shown poorly, using multiple events for some reason, like the pool of blood and that snowdrift that blocked the path back. It would be better to just use different maps with those effects added as normal tiles or one event with a large sprite and several blocking events to prevent passage. The way it was in the game, it just doesn't look good.

You do have potential to create a good horror game, I can see that. You've managed to create a somewhat solid atmosphere before the protagonist left the shelter to gather wood. It's just that the rest of the game went downhill. Continue making games, take the lessons from this project and I'm sure whatever you make next will be better!

SPOILERS!!!

The setup is very scary! Getting snowed in and the looming threat of a murderer on the loose had me quite tense the whole way through. However the final fight wasn't all that hard, since I had to fight like 5 different wild animals before I got there XD Joan is a battle hardened girl at that point!

I think the combat would be a lot more scary and tense if the character doesn't heal immediately after an encounter ends, so I have a reason to manage my resources instead of spamming attack like a maniac... Well, I did play as Joan so I imagined a neat little scenario in my head, you gotta love when girls are allowed to do violence!

There is a bug that occurs whenever you try to escape a random encounter and fails... It gets stuck on the next turn but no text appear, and you can't move or do anything. I had to reload my save whenever it happens, and ended up just spamming through combat instead of escaping later on.

In all, I think this game has a lot of potential! I think it'd be very scary if the combat aspect were adjusted, but overall it's a very neat short game. :D Good job!

However, one great thing about this game is that you've managed to make the browser version run in actual fullscreen on itch.io. How did you manage to do that?

Ok, so, I've tried to play this. Made it until the part where you are trying to find firewood in the forest. I got into a battle with a wolf, I tried to escape, didn't succeed, the wolf attacked and then the fight just seemed to be stuck without continuing. The game didn't freeze, it just didn't proceed to the next round.

I reloaded and this time I managed to flee. Made it to the wood, but afterwards, I kept getting attacked by wolves in turn based battles every few tiles. Once, I tried to flee, failed and the game got stuck again. I guess either there's something wrong with the troop events or some plugin causes issues. I stopped playing after that.

There's a lot of "chopped up" images where there's clearly visible blank lines through them. Seems you are using individual events for each part of the "whole", which causes it to look like this. In the future, either use tiles or make it one large sprite with one graphical event and several other events that don't have any graphic and just are there so you can interact with all of the parts of that graphic.