Love this game! It and Infested capture the atmosphere of the old Kemco games perfectly.
First, let me say how much I LOVED the keyboard hotkeys to select actions. This little quality-of-life tweak makes playing the game much more enjoyable. Much as I loved Shadowgate, Deja Vu, and Uninvited, the slowness of having to move the cursor around and click on verbs definitely made actual gameplay more cumbersome, so this was a really welcome feature.
I'm also really impressed with how well you succeeded in coming up with a completely original story while still capturing the feel of the NES Kemco games. Well done!
I do have a couple of pieces of hopefully constructive criticism for future projects: [SPOILERS]
- I completely missed the fact that the fruit regrows in the same spot over time. Unless I'm overlooking something, there wasn't any hint that this was the case in-game. After obtaining the first piece, I wandered around for ages trying to find the second piece – I figured there was another tree south of the desert or something. It never occurred to me to revisit the screen with the fruit tree since I thought I'd collected everything that screen had to offer, which led to a lot of frustrated wandering around. I eventually had to check out a walkthrough video on YouTube to find the solution. Maybe a bit of text along the lines of "You notice a bud already beginning to regrow from where you cut off the fruit. Perhaps fruit trees grow faster in this magical land?" after you take the first fruit?
- The cicada puzzle was also a bit opaque. I could tell it was supposed to be a clock face, but I thought the solution must require a specific time, since that was the case with the earlier puzzles for the sun and moon. I eventually managed to brute force the solution, but didn't realize that the solution is the current time whenever you happen to be trying to open the lock. A cryptic inscription hinting in that direction would have been a good addition. I'll acknowledge that this one is more subjective, though – perhaps the solution was more obvious to other players, and just didn't click for me.
All in all, though, I thought the puzzles were generally very well balanced – just enough hints in-game to point the player in the right direction without holding their hand completely and making the game boring.
Looking forward to your next project!