Here we go! Part 1 of 4 of my playthrough of your game. The next parts will go up daily, if you are interested - which I obviously hope you are.
Now to get to all of the good stuff right away - I LOVE a lot of things about this game. I love the premise, I love the monster designs, I love the concepts behind the majority of the puzzles, I love the wonderful pixel art and the music, the immensely well placed scares... you've created an awesome world down in that basement, and crafted a very cool horror story that racks things up at all the right beats. Wonderful stuff, all around, so absolutely pat yourself on the back there.
However, as I am sure will become clear through my playthrough - it is also incredibly frustrating, and I didn't make that a secret in my earlier comment.
I understand you want to create tension, and to do so you have ramped up the difficulty. I do, however, feel that you are on some levels confusing "challenge" with "hair-pulling irritation". The concepts are fine - a slow character with only matches and light to keep enemies at bay. However, it constantly feels like everything is just a little short - like the matches last just a little too shortly, like you move just a tad too slow. In particular (SPOILER) the boss fight with Cathrin feels like it's meant for a game where you play a different character, and several puzzles, while fine in concept and I mostly had no issue figuring out after a few tries, had me dying multiple times before I could even move far ahead enough to see the things I needed to see in order to piece the puzzle together. And with the limited save states and slow movement speed, that resulted in every death meaning a sloooooow jog back to where I was, doing all the same tasks again and again and again. Death didn't become a punishment for failing a fair challenge. Death became a chore I had to deal with to try again, and a punishment for playing in the first place.
You will hear me get very frustrated over the course of the game, and judging from comments below, I may simply have had a uniquely hard time with the game and played badly overall, and playing frustrated probably doidn't help. I will concede that. I do still feel there are times where the sheer frustration of the gameplay overpowers what is otherwise an excellently crafted horror experience, and I try to make it very clear in the video what my problems are.
To put it as short as I can: Under normal circumstances, I would probably have given up halfway through out of sheer irritation more than anything else. But the aesthetics, the story and the atmosphere made me keep going - on top of just plain old stubbornness after having invested a lot of time. And I don't think that's the ideal state to put your player in. But then, we might simply disagree on the style of challenge we like.
Please don't misunderstand any complaints I express in the playthrough. I LOVE what you have created here. But I do believe the game could stand a slight re-balancing to make it ust a little bit more bearable, and make you just a little more excited to retry what you just failed - instead of hammering through out of sheer stubborn irritation.
I still loved The Basement, absolutely. And I hope to see more exciting stuff from you.