I just played Inner Sanctum and it was... Wow! Quite something actually. In the right way. The first thing that comes to my mind is: beautiful. This game is beautiful. And not only from a graphical point of view. The scares are effective and the good ending brings so much satisfaction. There was such passion put into this game. I wouldn't be surprised if your game ended up among the first places of the game jam.
Now, the praises are nice and all. But now, I'll talk about what I noticed that was... less good so we can really have constructive criticism here. Don't worry, your game is so good I'll mostly be nitpicking here. So like you say: "Without further ado..."
- The game has not (or not much) been optimized for mouse play. For evidence: the fountain at the entrance. For some reason, when the ME kicks in (or out), the character suddenly stops in her track. Two reasons I think why it happened. It's either an event on the ground or you used a plugin to give an event to the fountain with a ranged effect. Both ways to go are not bad per se, but they mess up with mouse movements. My way to tackle this problem is to have the game keep track of the player's X and Y position and have a parallel event that takes care of position related events where we don't want the character's movements to be stopped abruptly. Another way to prevent this is to use a plugin to deactivate the possibility to control the character with the mouse.
- Sometimes, when entering a room, the ambient light didn't load fully. This is minor, but this can make a player out of his experience. To solve this problem, you can hide the screen to the player, just to let the time to the game to load the light, then you reveal it after the game have loaded the effect behind the scene.
- Speaking of the ambient light, sometimes it isn't centered or it seems like it's cut abruptly and it does not really look good to me when that happens. (Also, there is a little problem on one of the trees at the left garden.
- Now I have a question what is the point of letting the player tuning the flashlight on and off? If there were a setback to the flashlight's use, I'd understand, but you get no penalty for using it. Why would you ever turn your flashlight off except for the challenge? Yeah, maybe for the challenge for really those who want to test their knowledge of the game, maybe?
- At one point with Henry, you get to gain "Success Points". It is never introduced anywhere else in the game so I kept playing not understanding what it was. It seems it is a mechanic proper to Henry, but again it's not explained.
- Speaking of Henry, I thought it was the least developed of all. His relationship with his family could have come sooner to really sell the possibility Henry might hate them.
- With a simple plugin, you can certainly hide the useless MP bar. I suggest to check how the other plugins are made so you can make your own. This is what I ended up doing to hide the Level info from the Status Window of my game.
Now, I'm done. Thanks a lot for your participation. Again, it is a beautiful and competent game. I wish you a lot of success with it.Good luck for the game jam!