Thank you so much!! I really appreciate the long and detailed critique and I'm so glad that you enjoyed it and that you found the story intriguing!
A lot of your critiques are things I had been thinking about--either stuff that I ran out of time to implement fully or that I ran out of time to figure out exactly how I wanted to do them, ha ha.
I definitely think it's a flaw that the only two statements you can press are from the introduction. I don't want to make the players able to turn off the ! because part of the idea for me is that SAM's built in polygraph can be set off either by lies or by intense emotion--which comes up a lot in therapy. I want the player to have to sort through what's really suspicious and what isn't. Of course, I didn't really achieve that with this, either, since the player can't really do much with any of the statements except the lies.
I still haven't decided how I want to go about fully implementing that idea. With the way the basic menus work I could never fit all the ! statements on screen so I'd have to figure out a different way of pressing. That's something I'm going to be spending a lot of time figuring out. If you have any suggestions, let me know!
I almost put a flag on whether or not you found out about her love of robots but decided to concentrate on other things. That should be something that's easy to go back and put in now that the jam is over and the time press is gone.
Going at things from different angles is something I want to do more with so I'm glad you enjoyed that element!
And yeah, the space thing is another thing that was kind of rushed because I needed to get it in for story reasons but didn't have the time to do much with. SAM actually only asks about it if you see a certain number of suspicious statements regarding being in space/on the ship, but if you're playing the game at all thoroughly it's hard to avoid seeing them. It's a fair critique that it doesn't allow the players to come to the conclusion on their own this way.
I'm so glad you liked Gema! I'll pass on your compliments to the artist. My family has a really extensive history of all sorts of mental illnesses (anxiety and ADD included) so creating good representation for people with mental illnesses--especially in a game about therapy--was something that was important to me in coming up with the idea for this game, so I'm really happy that you appreciated that! In the full game every character will have different mental illnesses that they deal with (and that you help them with) in different ways.
But once again, thank you for this incredibly detailed critique! This is all stuff that I was wondering how people would respond to, so this is all incredibly helpful! If you have time to go through and point out spelling and grammar stuff it would be really helpful, but I don't want to make you go out of your way too much.