I’ll start off with the things I liked. The game is visually appealing, it feels like a rather simplistic style at first but it really caught my attention with the use of bright red cherry blossoms, it adds a nice contrast to the otherwise dark environment. The art style of the images in the beginning and end of the game is also very good. The story, while a tad bit confusing, is interesting once you piece it all together, the lack of spoken or even written words makes this a bit tricky though, but I still enjoyed it. Lastly, I liked the overall atmosphere and the way things are presented to the player.
There is one glaring issue that slapped me right in the face immediately, the game’s brightness, it’s turned up so high that at times I could barely tell what was happening in some scenes, though the still images are just fine. A more minor issue I found was with the camera, I have no issue with the fixed camera perspective but at times it follows the character closely when it shouldn’t, like when entering some classrooms, the camera sticks to the character, but with others it follows the character from outside the classroom, I feel that this creates some awkwardness as the player has a high chance of getting stuck on something or lost, given the amount of objects in a room. As I said, a very minor thing but for some reason it stood out to me as an issue.
All in all, as an undergraduate project this is good. A bit of polish and some brightness/contrast correction and you’ve got yourself an interesting and spooky game.
I hope you don’t mind but I made a let’s play video of the game over on my channel.
Cheers and best wishes,
Killjoy