That was such a game that just playing it made me in better mood and brought smile in my face.
While I liked this game a lot, I do have some things to point out.
Biggest problem with this game was in figuring out what you are supposed to do. I did figure it out already on second game, so to some extent this was intuitive, but what I am seeing here is, that this would be a perfect game for some preschooler/toddler. Not alone, but as part of one of the things you could do. I think this would be absolutely super on christian something like that.
But generally speaking, even when probably having figured things out, it still left a feeling of confusion about many thing. One thing that wasnt working properly by the way, was the church. I guess you meant character to get energy back up to 50 percent, but actually being inside church only stops reducing the bar when below 50, not increasing it.
This also reminds me of one more confusion, the final score. I actualyl until this moment thought that it was one of the positive scores the longer you spent in church (being a christian game after all), but after re-reading your devblog about this, i now understand that it was just one of the things recorded, and basically a negative thing. Since optimally you complete the game as fast as possible wihtout going inside the church at all. While I thought idea was to complete as fast as possible and also spent as much time as possible inside church.
Graphics are fantastic when thinking this be preschooler/toddler game. They also make you yourself feeling happy when you see all those funny smiling blobbles going around the screen. This the only game so far from ones i have tested (I think only "hope" is left to try" that actually managed to change my mood into much better. Although Sketche99s game did at one point affect my mood greatly too when i started feeling relaxed on it for a moment. But this did a huge positive difference. And similarly, the music suits this purpose perfectly too.
Also the passage itself, encourage each one is brilliantly interpreted to game mechanics. Especially when i checked your devblog list of those things, You really did remarkable job in implementing them all to such a working mechanic. That while I personally might not like this game that much in sense that I am not looking forward to playing it again, i can see how this is a great game for preschooler/toddlers, and could see how my daughter couple of years ago had been asking to play this game more. She is now 8 years old, and I am planning to put her to play this game at some point too. I might write about that at later point, basically I think she might enjoy it for a while, but might not ask to play it again anymore, since she is bit too old perhaps already.
When coming to preschooler/toddler, what is so great about this is, that it is very easy to manage different kind of difficulties and pace and so on, to suit any need. This is very flexible design in my opinion, and i think they will enjoy being inside the church when they can peek out from window with the character, that is another small but important feat in this game. I would however make small difference to the playing system. Instead of pressing keyboard, which might be difficult thing for toddler to figure out, there could be maybe 3 different colored buttons on the ground that you can push down so that one of them at down is active. Then people with this colored sign would be the ones that get encouraged by the bump.
Also, the movement of character actually solved one of my problem. For I had this game long ago that i never finished but have been thinking every now and then where idea was to move some sort of shield of something with a mouse (never figured what it would be that is being moved) but what i wanted was some sort of moving behind mouse feature, and i never figured how to do it. I was mainly using this do exactly as mouse, but delayed, and it didnt work very fine. I think your system is perfect, move behind mouse, and further the mouse is away, faster it should move. That felt quite natural. Im going to steal that idea from you and use it on that game of mine if i am ever going to finish it.
All in all a great game that makes you in good mood when you play it. Biggest problem in game is general confusion, some instructions in any form, even txt file would have really helped, and basically I think this should be part of some christian (or even non christian) preschooler/toddler game. Hence naturally I might personally not feel so interested in this game, but I think this is a great, and with little changes a part of commercial grade preschooler/toddler product.
Fantastic entry, except for the overall confusion that stays even after you play.