Honestly I'd love to see more smaller, more experimental entries in the Basin Lake series going forward. I don't know if all of them will work out, but I think there's room to explore with less risk there.
- I did get that I could paint across multiple targets, but it didn't really seem worth it to do so over just spam-clicking. Maybe something to tweak in the future. I absolutely get that combat is something that had to be pared down to limit the overall scope.
- I'm still not a fan of this sort of vague storytelling in general, but if it's setup for something later, then I'm willing to reserve judgement until the possible future payoff.
- I think the mix of art styles struck me as dissonant and odd because in some ways the backgrounds are "nicer" than the foregrounds. In particular, they have colour and shading, while the manga-style foreground graphics have no colour and only pattern shading. I think the paper texture and hard outlines present in the foreground graphics (both portraits and UI) clashed with the much softer and more natural backgrounds a bit. It might also be because the background elements have a hand-drawn look to them, while the foreground elements look more synthetic, probably because of the pattern shading. I do think a mix of art styles with the foreground standing out from the background can work, I just don't think this particular combination was the best.