I think I played this one on the 1st of November before ratings worked, so now I’m playing it again just to remind myself of it…

Writing: The bit at the start is fun, especially that it asks me if I understand and want to proceed, but if I reply no it tells me that I have to proceed anyway… which is probably good because I’m not a big fan of VNs being full of “early ends”, although I’d say the most annoying ones are things like “go left” and “go right” with “go right” being “there randomly happens to be a hungry werewolf there, bad ending” when there were no hints about which option was right or wrong.

I think it would be fun if I could say things like “I like animals too, but my favourite animals are hedgehogs” or something like that… well, I guess handling all the things players could want to say would be a bit like making a real chatbot. It’s just that Cinder likes talking about the frogs but the player character never says anything about frogs or really anything else than answer her questions and ask her one question. I mean, I could get why you keep Cinder from being too human, but I feel like it’s almost making the player character non-human or very shy.

Theme: The part with the minigames seems almost too cozy, but the start (legal stuff, getting called pumpkin) and endings do fit the jam.

Audio: The music sounds electronic and it sounds cozy until you get to the scarier part, at which point it sounds somewhat eerie, while still seeming like it’s the same song. And I like it, although maybe I’d have preferred the main menu to have a slightly more interesting or just different version, since I tend to leave main menus on the screen when I’m typing feedback. I think the music fits something techy like that chatbot.

I do feel like the music shouldn’t necessarily restart after the credits screen.

The GUI sounds are nice too and fit the VN pretty well.

I notice the Settings menu includes a volume slider for voice. Was that supposed to be an electronic voice? Oh, I guess it’s for those who enable self-voicing. And yeah, at some point while playing that word guessing minigame I accidentally started typing a word when it wasn’t expecting me to, and as I pressed V it started reading stuff aloud. It doesn’t sound very human, but I guess if I couldn’t read it would be better than no speech. It’s not a VN with a lot of speaking characters, so I guess it wouldn’t be extremely difficult to add VA for (unless you want it to be able to say a name the player typed).

Art: I think both Cinder herself and the backgrounds look pretty good and they also fit together well. The wall and the floor seem to be fighting a bit with each other though (there’s a bit of floor on the wall and a bit of wall on the floor).

And Cinder sometimes blinkig her eyes seems like a nice touch of realism.

The logos also look pretty good, like they could be real logos.

And the UI looks like something a tech company would be proud of. It doesn’t look painted like the other stuff, but it fits the game’s theme.

Fun: The minigames are fun, although when I left self-voicing enabled one of them constantly it says a bunch of numbers aloud.

And I like the main menu too. Including the text that changes depending on when I’m playing.

And the fact that it has three endings if you win the eye minigame and another three if you lose.