Ahoy there!

What a story! Excellent story and plot design. I enjoyed the haunting conclusion.

I am also impressed that you used Unreal for this. I am only starting to learn Unreal and I think you must be quite skilled to pull this off so nicely.

I thought the music was spot on, especially the menu music, with the tracks fitting the theme and the story very well.

I loved the hand-drawn character sprites, my first impression was that they were very cute and varied from each other.  I think that Nova SWARM's suggestion of adding a black outline is very good. 

My favourite background was the background of the school with the candles glowing in an eerie green light. Transition effects between backgrounds will help smooth the gameplay experience when we enter a new scene.

One important note, is the white flash is a little fast/sudden for me to handle, and could be possibly triggering for someone with epilepsy. 

I hope you and the team enjoy continuing this project after the jam!

All the best,

Ocelot.

First of all very nice job on creating a VN using unreal engine, I can't even imagine all the programming must go into that. This is a very fun premise and series of events. The character design for all of the characters (including some of the antagonist characters) are very fun. Great job on the backgrounds especially with the variety you had! Your use of lighting is very good and does the job of leading the eye to important parts of the scene. Also all the character interactions felt very natural and well written.

A few notes that I think could elevate this should you choose to update it and work on it more:

• The volume sliders don't work even after hitting the confirm button
• "Went left/right" sounds a bit awkward as they are past tense. I suggest changing this to "Go left/right" potentially?
• There's currently an uneven white outline on the character sprites. I don't know if it's because of how they were exported or if the transparency was created after the characters were drawn. One easy method of cleaning this up is to apply a black outline to all the current sprites that would go over this white outline. Most drawing programs have a 'stroke' effect you can apply to images
• It's currently a bit difficult to see your characters and background due to the size of the dialogue box. I suggest either moving the characters and the background up or shrinking the size of the dialogue box down and splitting up the pieces of longer dialogue so we can see your art better.
• I found the character name a bit difficult to read with the current text box colour. Especially when Aaron was right under it as he has very similar colours to the name text colour.

Overall this is impressive for how much time we had and it's a very promising story! I hope that you keep at it and potentially update the VN if you can spare the time.