Nice work dude. This is cool. My notes:
- Awesome sound design. You nailed that.
- Really love the skeleton with the note. That's the kind of stuff that keeps me wanting to explore this place. I'd lean into that more tbh. Doesn't have to be notes, but just little bits of environmental storytelling. Especially in the intro area, the more the better imo. It's pretty low effort/high reward content to add.
- Puzzles feel good so far. I had a nice "a ha" moment when I figured out the bucket and the library.
- The torch seems too bright to me... It kind of ruins the spooky feeling of the place. Before, it was very atmospheric, even with the simple rectangular walls. After I got the torch, it felt much less interesting of a place.
- Saying "Checkpoint reached" so many times is unnecessary. Especially when I haven't yet had anything happen that would reset me. Saying it at all is not needed imo. If the player gets set back, they will realize there is a checkpoint. Don't break the atmosphere with game related popups.
- The pickup system is excellent. Didn't understand it at first because it said "Pickup list". I thought I was going to pick up a list of something. But once I understood it, I thought "why the fuck didn't every RPG do something like this instead of opening containers". Feels great.
- Way too much walking for the darkness puzzle. Once I figured it out (which was satisfying), I had to trudge through to actually implement my solution. The whole second area feels unnecessarily large.
- Enemy is way too fast. Once I hear him I'm spooked and running away. He really doesn't need to be actually tough, just scary. Once I run away and put my torch out, I should have a good chance of escaping. That's a much more exciting and interesting moment than getting run down and killed.
- Stopped once I died, but I can see myself playing all the way through this. Main takeaway: I can see you put a lot of work into creating a mood. And you do. Now just protect that mood. Little things, like the color keys, break it. Keep things on theme.
Nice work.
P.S. I was only getting ~500 fps. Not enough, please optimize more.