As usual in my comments, I will try to detail my very own experience and to review the game with my lacking English vocabulary, and my own perception of video games, so the below is very personal. It is also, like all of my reviews, written in order to help the creator to (maybe) see qualities and flaws in their creation, but definitely not with the goal to be negative. Let's go:
Trip does hold its name so well! This game is 100% about the meanings (plural!) of a trip, both for us players and for the developer. I would suspect that even the AI that created the art was powered with LSD lol! I feel that this project was born from a concept, which is that a trip is a kind of dream, and the word trip can have several different meanings depending on the context, and I love the idea. If you don't know at least five different meanings of the word Trip, play this and wait for the ending scene!
The pictures are beautiful and detailed, particularly the environments (I liked the characters a little less - well they're just pictures of realistic people), and give a real feeling of evasion. The ones with plenty of colors and exotic places are definitely great to look at and convey all the emotions of this game imo. When you start playing Trip, what you want to see is these beautiful paintings that invite you to continue the journey up, or down, or left, or right.
I liked the AI art and how everything has been put together with Renpy. The transitions effects are interesting and well done! There are a few issues however in the game imho, but they are not very troublesome. The first issue I would notice is that some texts are going too fast and you don't have time to read them (final video), but I'm not a native English speaker and so I don't read English fast (yet I think it's important to take this profile of players into account). The second issue is more a matter of tastes, so I can't really say if it's an issue or not, but I find that the font used in the video (and to write the word TRIP) is beautiful but doesn't fit with the rest of the art. As you can see those issues are not a big deal and are very personal. Maybe the biggest issue is that quickly the game gets stuck into a loop until you unlock the final scene?
The gameplay itself is minimalist. It's not a bad thing, yet it's not a good thing either as it can become a little boring after a few clicks. Yet that was enough for me to continue to play and see where it was going, and I had a good time. I just wouldn't play like that for hours to a game, but in the current case that was a pleasant experience. As said above, you just choose in what direction you want to "trip": up, down, left, right, with a few variations. It's just like you're in a dream (or under drugs maybe but I've never experimented), you don't control anything at all in the different situations, but you can still decide a little bit in what direction you want the dream to continue on. In that aspect, Trip is a real success: you are a spectator, you see mysterious things happening before your astonished eyes and you have absolutely no control on them, and you just trip.
Trip might have needed a bit more of a context, or a narration. I don't know. On the one hand I like it like that: the main character is clearly sleeping and tripping, but once the trip has started for the player, I feel like giving him more context could have improved the experience. Or maybe not a context, but an objective to reach? I don't know. I found it interesting for example that there is the "5" to see, but it's quite easy to find it in the game. Maybe it could have been something more difficult to unlock, after travelling in all directions for example. In addition this 5 is important and it's not immediately clear what it means. I liked it that way, but I feel like using the exact same picture for the 5 we see in game, and the 5 in the ending video, is a bit of a shame. I would have wished to see something different and unique in the final video. Nevertheless, even if the picture of the 5 is similar in the game and in the ending scene, there is still extra content in the ending scene, thanks to the additional text that give the different meanings of Trip, so I can't complain :)
A word of conclusion. There would be more to say about Trip, about the music, the finition, etc, but I feel that the most important in my case was said above. The rest of the game is just what makes of it a game or an experience. It is short, strange, psychedelic somehow, and comes with a very unique idea of the theme of the Jam. Well done TreeDancer, and thanks a lot for creating this game and sharing it with all of us! I really hope you learned, had fun, and will continue to evolve and share your ideas with all of us at The Icehouse and on itchio.