I played this one in Firefox. And Firefox crashed. Must be the beautiful art. Attracting bugs in Firefox like real world flowers (and sometimes pictures of them!) attract real world bugs. Don’t worry. I don’t think bugs in Firefox are your fault. It’s just spooky that they crash the browser in the part of the VN that’s supposed to be scary (the crashes seemed to happen whenever I hadn’t clicked on anything for a couple of seconds, and I guess that getting scared made me look away from the screen for a moment, not clicking anything, and then “of course” the game crashed, but yeah, I don’t think it’s your fault).
Story and theme: I liked the story, although I did find it somewhat scary (but I think that was intentional, so I’m treating it like a positive thing). Of course, the scary part got a bit ruined by Firefox crashing, but in retrospect I guess that crash actually made plenty of sense from a story point of view, since it happened when I was supposed to make a choice, and it didn’t seem like a choice where it would have made a lot of sense to take my time to decide what to do. I also liked the bonus section.
I think I tend to think of beauty as something to look at from afar. Because if you try to look at every brushstroke in a painting, you’ll probably find that some strands of grass were painted individually and others were just part of some long zig-zag line or something (or at least, I’ve taken shortcuts like that myself, and I imagine I can’t be the only one doing things like that). It’s the same with games: everything looks nice until you realise that sometimes a piece of text appears and disappears before you can read it (that could be a content warning, or it could be the dialogue that shows before a chapter heading briefly showing up again after the chapter heading, or something like that). I guess beauty really attracts bugs.
Now that I know what each character finds beautiful, I might as well mention that I think in real life, different people find different things beautiful, and sometimes people care way too much about beauty (and once scary people find you beautiful, you stop trusting anyone that finds you beautiful, or at least that happened to me irl).
I liked the unlockable section about the characters. Especially the bonus stories and the thing that was sorta hinted at in the game.
I noticed that the characters seem to be named after flowers, but apparently even if I start over it doesn’t let me choose a new name for the MC. So I guess it’s good that the name I tend to choose when VNs ask for a name is sorta plant-related, even if not in English (if games suggest a default name, I tend to go with that, otherwise if the game or its page hasn’t definitely told me that the MC is male or female I go with names like Kim [usually male in Denmark, usually female in English-speaking countries] or Yuri [I think that one’s male in Russia and female in Japan]; I guess those names actually work as flower-related but I would have chosen an English flower name if I had to pick a name on another playthrough).
Audio: There seems to be beautiful music but I’ve been careful to advance the dialogue fairly often to avoid crashing the browser, which might have made me hear less of it. But even when having to pay attention to other things at the same time, I can tell the different pieces of music fit well both with each other and with the situations they’re being played in.
The voice acting seemed pretty good (although I think there was a place where one line of text got assigned the audio for two lines of text, and a place where some word, probably the word “no”, got the text split before it and the audio split after it or vice-versa; yeah, cutting audio is kinda hard, and I haven’t seen a lot of entries with VA in this jam). And there’s also good sound effects, perhaps more noticeably in act 2 where they matter the most.
Art: Beautiful, but a bit hard to put into words. I like how painterly it looks. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time looking at one image so as not to crash Firefox again, but I did look at screenshots. The gothic building, with the glowing windows, overgrown walls and various decorations looks beautiful and eerie at the same time. Even the sprites look beautiful and eerie at the same time. Just look at Ivy looking at the player/camera. And Camille’s eyes look sorta big, which can look cute but also look like she’s staring. Then again, staring eyes might be beautiful, at least if you take “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder” literally.
Character designs: If it means the sprites, just see what I said about art. And if it means the characters in the story, I guess I’d refer to the story and theme section, although I didn’t say much about the characters to avoid unnecessary spoilers. But I did say something about characters in both.
UI and accessibility: The UI seems to be on theme with the story (and I’m guessing that heart shape the vines form is intentional). The quit button with the carved corners (or whatever it’s called) looks nice, although it leaves me wondering why the forwards and back buttons don’t have some decorations too (even something like making the diagonal edges a bit curved would probably have made them look a bit more flowery; unless you made them with straight lines to make it more obvious that they are buttons and not just decorations). And the character colours (each character having her own font colour) are nice too (especially since the colours change little enough that they don’t make the text hard to read).
There’s a forwards button and a back button. And I can go forwards with the keyboard but to go backwards I need the mouse. And progress in the first chapter doesn’t seem to go lost when the game crashes but progress within the second chapter might. But if I reach the end of the second chapter, the characters section stays unlocked. And even when in fullscreen it’s possible to go back to the main menu (and probably out of the game, if I had downloaded it instead of playing it in-browser… I can see the button to quit the game but since web browsers treat the game as a page inside another page they don’t let it close the tab, so I guess the closest you could do would be to make it exit fullscreen instead of exiting if it were in a web build).
Marketing: The capsule image gives me a clue that there’s probably going to be beautiful art, and the logline shows that it’s probably a horror story, and both are correct. And the page seems pretty complete too (with feature list, screenshots and everything, and even flowers). I also like the logo with the flourish and the cut word.