Thanks for your input! I'll add some of this to the game description in a bit for clarification but I can say in advance that not counting the main screen, the whole thing has -sadly- only 16 screens total. However 6 of those screens are 3 image sequences, from which some of them are animated (and it's not just camera movements, it's actual frame by frame animation with a loop). Then, there are three more screens with an alt version and the final 2 screens have plenty of alts, animation and some ren'py tricks to add some spice. The whole thing required 64 illustrations, which is WAY more than the usual 20 I make for my PDFs. Soo even considering the alts that make use of previous illustrations and not counting those that required little work to do nor the animation work, the whole thing has 31 whole illustrations. Add to that the coding for the various effects, writing the full dialogue (something I don't or barely do for the PDFs) and you'll see why I ended pushing the price so high.
That said, I do take note, I've seen cheaper VNs here in itch.io and while mi initial calculations brought the price to $24, I did my best to lower it to $18. I know it's not enough, but the whole deal took so long to make that my bills piled up. Then there was the whole Gumroad fiasco, that used to be my main page for sales and now that's gone up in smoke. Taxes here on Itch.io are strangling me. I'm really, really thankful to everyone that bought the game despite the price, y'all helping me pay my mortgage and put feed my family. I really didn't want to put my prices so high because y'all have been so good to me all these years. I'm really sorry for that.
What I can actually do is to put the PDF for free for all those who already bought the game, and later sell it separately at $10. You can wait until then, it shouldn't be more than a week or two. Again, many thanks everyone for the heads up.