Thank you very much for the extensive feedback!
Some responses:
> I feel that the sprite animations could generally feel smoother and less rigid
I fully agree and the sprite animations used to be smoother actually, but we had to cut a ton of frames due to Ren'Py's limitations. Regardless of your computer's strength including more than about 20 frames for the animation turned out to make the game extremely laggy. In some cases we had to cut the number of frames down from over 200 frames, so you can imagine how much of a difference that makes in the final product. Unfortunately leaving these frames in would have made the game close to unplayable in some parts, so we had little choice. A sprite that still has a little more frames would be Maaku, the demon girl you briefly see at the start, and you can still notice some performance issues during her brief appearance.
> An option to turn off sprite animations would be appreciated
I can definitely understand this point since the idle animations are ongoing and it's part of the reason why I asked whether the side portraits would be better as static images as well. It's not as easy as just having the game show only a single frame unfortunately, so it will require quite some development time to create and include/match what's currently there as an animated version with a non-animated version. So any extra user options like that might have to wait depending on how we spend our limited time.
> There's the very occasional typo or odd word choice
I am the writer and English is not my first language. I have a proofreader, but am a little reluctant to accept big changes to the meaning of sentences so I might have accidentally ignored some fixes that were required. I will have a look at them.
> I loved the greenhouse and the CG in it!
Thank you! The artist for this and similar illustrations in the future is: https://x.com/KaruheYKH
> Scrolling through the gallery seems a bit slow
Since the gallery is not yet functional I will have a look at this once we can properly test it as it is intended to work.