Amazing visual storytelling!! Very well done. Really fun word play mechanics that reminded me of board games like So Clover! or Codenames. I really enjoyed figuring out the puzzles. Thank you for the solutions tutorials in the description as well.... you'll see where I got stuck.... 19:06 is when I figured out there was a missing potion I hadn't found yet....omg that was so frustrating I thought I was losing my mind trying to brute force it...
Other than that one room, everything else was perfect! The ending was excellent and gave me a real horror feeling!! Amazing lighting and color design. Overall, the visual storytelling was just top notch, it was really fun to figure out what the solution was just by the visual clues. To be honest, the whole drama between the laboratory scientists felt a bit superfluous, as it didn't seem to have a direct relation to gameplay, but it was interesting nonetheless as it made the world feel more fleshed out and immersive.
At first it wasn't totally clear if my potions were failing. In the first room, before I had a successful potion, i had no context of what a fail vs. success was. If you were to add a message like "Hmm.. that didn't work" or force the first room to be a guaranteed success with just two ingredients, it could introduce a successful brew right away so the player knows what they're looking for without any trial and error. But in the first room, it didn't take me long to pick up the clues I needed to figure it out. Once I noticed the tree sitting in the chair I "got it"! Very clever.
Excellent game! I had a lot of fun :)