The lights didn't feel that great in this game. Would have been nicer if there was more ambient light. You can set a mood without everything being pitch black. The flashlight didn't feel all that useful considering the 5 minute duration on the batteries. If it had infinite duration and just needed to recharge after 5 minutes, sure, but with the limitation, I felt like it would have been nice to have it more useful. The lantern reduces your view radius and removes your default light unlike the flashlight so it also wasn't that useful, especially since the enemies seem to still come after you.

Had an issue where the combat lights just didn't activate and I just instant gamed over. This just felt really unfair and eventually it was so annoying that I stopped playing. Especially with the longer cutscenes of each gameover instead of just a return to last save or w/e. 

I've noticed that a lot of RPG Maker games seem to try to do horror by adding more enemies. I honestly feel like it is better to have fewer, but more important enemies. More enemies ends up being more annoying than scary because you end up desensitized to the enemies. Having one hit kills only makes it even more annoying.

The atmosphere is perfect, for me the tension was very high! The only downside was the frequent gameovers but maybe it's just me, I'm bad with horror games!

Also I really like the busts and portraits for characters: they give a lot of personality!

I'm not a huge fan of the horror-rpg genre, but this was decent with some humor. Instant gameovers aren't really fun, imo, but to each their own. Not a lot to add to Drifty's extensive comments.  I actually liked the unsettling heartbeat though. Character busts/interactions were good, and each felt unique. Slight increase to light area would be nice.  I didn't finish it, but I did really enjoy the Rabbit Bar (besides the instant gameover -- although that time I kinda saw it coming).

I like that you used particles.min.js to draw the lines and dots on the side bars. Good job with the sound design, with a few exceptions. It feels like it's missing some atmospheric music at the beginning, but the SEs are pretty good and there is decent BGM later on.

You should try to avoid showing plain text on a pure black background at the very beginning of the game unless it's just like one or two lines. It's a cold and boring start to any game when you don't at least show a picture in the background for the opening dialog.

In future titles maybe use buttons to run common events, like press 'F' to use the flashlight. This isn't hard to do and you can still have it useable via the menu like this game requires. 

The flashlight is super weak, and too much of the screen is just darkness at any one time. Also the light from the flashlight over exposes the the images behind it. Not sure if this is a blend mode issue or if it's just the alpha of the light color you picked, but honestly it just looks bad. In general all the maps are too dark. I understand you want to set an atmosphere, but you also need to be able to see the screen, because this is a game and you want fun gameplay.  A solution would be to just increase the light radius of everything in the game by a little bit more.

I like your attempt at custom art via the busts and such. Some missed the mark, but for a game jam they're just fine.

The maps have plenty of interaction events and for the most part it feels pretty fleshed out.

The 'combat system' if you can call it that, is a joke. No skills and a simple rat kills you. The first fight you get in you will Game Over.  I now understand why this is defaulted to 'Off'. Just remove it entirely unless you're going to give it at least a modicum of effort. Very disappointing.

I've never been a fan of instant death mechanics they typically just have you backtracking and repeating the same content over and over. I've died in this game many many times already and I'm kind of sick of the cutscenes already.

I find the heartbeat SE to be very unsettling, I'm not sure if that's what you were going for, but regardless I actually really don't like it. At some point (like after dying 6 times) I just turned off the ME.

When you go to the door to enter the passcode (which should have a show choice first)  if you hit enter the game spasms out and you hear the cancel sound effect played every frame until you cancel out. It sounds like a machine gun going off. 

There is a fatal flaw in this game that will result in several UNFAIR game overs. Let me explain how this occurs. The game puts you in a scenario that will instantly game over you when a ghost event touches the player event. The way you avoid this is by getting your flashlight out and shining it on them. BUT the issue here is, it only triggers the 'scared off the ghost with battle flashlight' event if both the ghost event and the player event are facing opposite from one another(They both need to be facing each other). 

So here's the instance where you unfairly game over: 

You 'sneak up' on a ghost from the side, shining your light on the ghost the ENTIRE TIME. The ghost will turn sideways to face you(looking right into your lit battle flashlight) and you Game Over! 

That should not happen. This is a big design flaw that needs to be addressed. If you want to portray the flashlight as being the weapon to fend off the instant game over ghosts, you need to make it work no matter which direction the GHOST is facing.  

Basically everything in the game kills you, it's best to do nothing in this game. 

Good job submitting a project to the game jam. I'm sure you've learned some valuable skills along the way. Good luck on your next projects.

I usually don't do well with horror games as a whole, but this definitely created a creepy atmosphere especially with the sound effects. I found it a bit hard to navigate with the limited vision but I guess that is where the flashlight/lantern mechanics come in - although it did feel like your vision is oddly larger without the lantern on. It was definitely helpful to have some of the key interactable highlighted in the dark.

The custom sprites and busts are really well done! And nice touch with the flashback cutscene that introduces some mystery with that creepy bunny. (Gotta find a holy hand grenade and start counting to 3...)

This game gives me classical rpgmaker game vibes and I love it