Writing: A cute and fun story. And I like how the ghost seems scary and dangerous at first and then suddenly seems nice and cute instead.

Theme: It’s about a meeting a ghost in a haunted mansion.

Audio: Some of the music sounds mysterious, some spooky, some cozy, some playful, and some cheerful. And all of it seems to fit the places where it gets played. I do notice some pieces aren’t really meant for me to leave them playing while I type feedback here though. I’d say the mysterious music that plays somewhere at the beginning seems fairly good at sounding good even when I’m listening without reading, but the cozy music that plays before you play hide and seek is a bit weird constantly starting and stopping as the thing that loops is a bit short and doesn’t do much interesting between each time it loops (the mysterious piano music at least has a little change in pace where it also has some other instruments playing).

And the music that plays on the “thanks for playing” screen… does that appear somewhere else in the story or is it just for endings. If the latter, then it’s pretty good for something people will probably only hear a couple of seconds of.

The sound effects also work well, and I notice there were some GUI sounds. I think maybe there could have been more of them, but that’s probably because I’ve grown used to specifically looking for things in the text that mention things that would probably have made some sound when they happen.

And there’s no voice acting. Not that I think there needs to be that. Maybe I’m a bit grateful for that as it does take quite a lot of time to properly review a VN with VA. But yeah, this one does have the advantage of not having a lot of characters (narrators make sense to leave unvoiced, and the character that the player controls should probably sound however the player wants them to sound, which you can’t know what is, so easier to leave silent, and that leaves only Cyrus as a candidate for voicing. Well, that’s still tricky: I think there’s some place where Cyrus says the MC’s name, which was picked by the player by typing it. I could see why that could be hard to get right.

Art: When the MC was using a flashlight, it felt odd that the backgrounds looked like they were only lit by moonlight. But when the flashlight was off, I think the backgrounds were fairly good. (Though I think there was some room that didn’t quite match the description of it in the text.)

I think Cyrus turned out pretty well. He does look quite anime compared to the backgrounds that look sorta like slightly simplified photographs. But considering he appears a lot more times than any of the backgrounds, I guess it makes sense.

Having a nicely customized GUI is nice. But make sure the text stays inside the box. The fact that it happens multiple times, including at the very start of the VN makes it seem somewhat unpolished. I’d probably make that box slightly wider, and add linebreaks in the text if some line still doesn’t fit.

Also, I see there’s a place where there’s smaller text. Is it meant to be whispering or was it to fit more text? I could read it well, but I think if it were whispering I’d probably have used punctuation marks to show that, and if it were a string too long to fit in the normal font size I’d have broken it into two strings.

Oh, and I like the drawing on the main menu and the “thanks for playing” screen too.

Fun: There were quite a few choices and they do seem to change things. I can even leave the house. And I get to choose a name and I think it doesn’t really matter what I put there. I think I once pressed enter and it let me take an empty name, but I quickly went back without checking if it had any effects later on.

What I like most: The story with choices and Cyrus’ sprite.

What I’d suggest changing: Maybe make the hallway look like it’s actually lit by a flashlight.

Interesting concept and nicely done character art! Great work for how quickly this was submitted too.