Heyo! I know the rating period hasn't begun yet, but I'll come back around to rate this then! I just got to a good stopping point, so I'll go ahead and start with my overall thoughts!
I'll have to be a bit blunt for a moment and admit that I find this game a bit pretentious. It's got a lot of random dark imagery thrown about, but so far it's not promising any especially compelling narrative to me. The characters speak in a bit of an awkward manner, and while I am somewhat curious about James and the girl he's looking for, I haven't been given much reason to care about James as a character. The dying wife plot with Sarah and Billy is pretty tragic from a straightforward perspective, but the way the characters are presented doesn't give me much reason to actually care about them; Billy is just a consistently rude old man who only seems to care about gun violence, and Sarah seems to be intentionally dull as a character, but as a result it's really hard for me to get invested in their personal struggle at all. James doesn't fill that void much better as a protagonist. The presentation is intentionally vague, but it ends up becoming confusing to me, rather than intriguing.
The visual presentation is pretty great for the most part. It's not exactly my style, but everything looks really good. The MP4s displaying seemingly random iconography at random times are both a bit jarring and noticeably blurrier than the base game itself, and I find most of the battle animations to be way too long, but otherwise the graphics are very well executed and appealing.
As for the combat, currently it's not introducing any interesting hook, and while I understand I'm relatively early in, only having access to brute force attacks and a self heal makes me not very eager to fight enemies. As I leveled up I eventually got a neat Reflect skill which seems pretty interesting, but that alone isn't enough to get me engaged in combat. With the party members for the two fights I had them the game was quite a bit more fun, although it remained pretty brutal in difficulty and really felt like I had to get lucky with enemies not targeting the same guy three times in a row with the same attack.
Overall Fun: 2/5 - The combat was a little below average for an RPG and exploration and story weren't huge highlights, but outside the game's general vague vibes, it was mostly poor encounter design that bogged down my experience; with so few options in combat and only one party member, enemies like Euthanasia and the fish dudes would completely stun lock me for several turns at a time, with my only hope for victory being luck. With so few options in combat, I'm not compelled to fight enemies either, so I was probably underleveled.
Controls/UI: 2/5 - While the controls themselves are just normal RPG Maker controls, the use of vague terminology like "PH" and "Swagger" adds unnecessary friction to understanding the effects of items and abilities, leading to me docking points. Gauges in battle are cramped and overlap each other, and the pictures when obtaining a new card also overlap with text boxes and just generally need a bit of restructuring.
Art: 4/5 - Very good art! Subjectively it's not to my specific sensibilities, but it all looks very well made and it's clear this is where most of the work went.
Sound/Music: 2/5 - The music was pretty good, but I have to dock huge points for that random Nirvana remix in chapter 2. Unless you actually got the rights to Smells Like Teen Spirit, I would say that's downright unacceptable. Otherwise, my main critiques are that the loop points aren't set for the tracks so they'll fade out and then start playing again a few seconds later rather than properly looping. There were also a couple stock RPG Maker sounds that could stand to be replaced.
I also did write live playthrough notes as I went which I couldn't really find a decent way to include here, but I'd be happy to come up with a way to get them to you if you'd like. Thank you for reading!