Oh god, I was not expecting that xD. I thought it was just going to be a simple little game with less than 1 minute of playtime, and here I am, sweating, trying to survive in this thrilling night and having a BLAST.
Let's start with the obvious: you absolutely NAILED the theme. Waaaaay too many jammers just do a classic game, add a door as an ending trigger and call it a day. Not yours. The theme leaves within your core gameplay, and it's an absolutely AMAZING concept. Your game is the reason why game jams exists: capturing the essence of a theme and building something around it. It's absolutely beautiful.
But an idea, even an amazing one, is nothing without the execution behind, and oh boy, you delivered. I didn't have to look at any instructions, everything is explained clearly and feels natural. Of course, a couple of children (and a mailman) had to be sacrificed during the learning process, but it really didn't took long and it was fun! At first, I found that the game was a little bit slow and easy, but at least it allowed me to get started.
And then it started to speed up.
And that's where the fun REALLY began. Going faster and faster, trying to read the letters without taking too much damage, the quicker and quicker decision making, what seemed to be "easy" started to become harder and harder. The risk/reward in this game is absolutely on point: of course, you can take the time to think about what to do, at the cost of damaging your door, but you can also play greedier, holding candies with the door opened, and trying to react to the monsters before it's too late (because of course, you had the genius mind to put more children than monsters, so of course, candies are better). That's top notch game design right there.
The sound design is really on point and helps a lot. Trying to react to the noise feels amazing. The ambiance is creepy, but I also appreciate you didn't go all the way to the "jumpscare way", because I hate jumpcares. The atmosphere is amazingly creepy, it's beautifully done.
And finally, there is the climax. The door breaks and you had this wonderful idea of NOT ending the game right here. I was surprised, but it was the best feeling ever. The moment I realised that the game was continuing and that I'm now in "overtime", I had that adrenaline rush that I never experienced with a jam game before. The survival instinct kicked in and it felt just amazing.
I could go on and on, but the general message here is: this game is absolutely amazing. I was a little bit deterred by the graphics at first (not about the art *itself*, but usually this kind of graphics are used by quite low-quality jam entries^^'), but very quickly, the quality of the game brought me above that.
Congratulations, you can be proud of you, I had an incredible time playing your game.