This is a bit long for a jam game (but since a lot of the games are hard to run on Linux, I spent more time playing the web and Linux games). I did beat the jam version but I haven’t beaten the pre-jam one. Particularly for a jam where those rating games have to play both the old version and the new version, it would have been nice if there was an easy to find list of differences so that I don’t have to go through a ten level long game twice. And speaking of time, when the game says it’s my turn, it waits a moment for me to read the “your turn” message before it lets me do anything, but I think it would have been better if I got control immediately when my turn started, and the message simply stayed on screen for a moment after I got control.
UI:The fonts work well, making the text easy to read while fitting a game set in the past.
But sometimes a piece of dialogue ends after the first word of a sentence. I’d suggest splitting at punctuation marks instead. If a sentence doesn’t fit on one screen, either rewrite it to fit or make it start at the start of the screen, end at the end of another screen, and break at a comma. Seeing “. Also,” and having to press X to see what’s after that, I think breaking at the full stop (period) works better than breaking at the comma. But maybe you were meaning for those pieces of text to be scrollable and didn’t have time to make that work. That would also explain while the mark in the bottom-right corner of messages doesn’t look like an X even though it’s X you want people to press to see the next message.
And another thing you could change after the jam: when the topmost item in a menu is selected and I press up, switch to the last item, and when the last one is selected and I press down, switch to the first one. A lot of PS1 menus did that.
But one really nice thing you got right, white text on a dark background. It’s nice that the text is readable.
Art: Really good, and it looks like it could have been a PS1 game.
Music: I like it, but I think maybe instead of playing the same theme on almost every level you could have played one of the cutscene pieces on some level to make it less sameish. I mean, it’s good music, it’s just that the length of the game means players have to hear it for quite a lot of time.
I also liked the writing and the gameplay. It would probably have been even better if I wasn’t having to beat the game within the rating period, but I think it was fun even when the time pressure made me feel like things could have moved a bit faster on screen (though I guess the ideal animation speed would depend on the player).