Thanks for the review! Yes we fully own up to the rough edges around the places. We couldn't deliver fully on the vision for the game as the chosen mechanic required far more assets than we could produce in time. Did we set an ambitious goal? Yes. Was it too high? Yes, but I'm happy that we stretched ourselves on this one. My experience of my team-mates is that they never seem to go for the easy option - instead of taking shortcuts everyone wants to push for something higher. Take the music for example, there are actually six layered tracks that are faded in and out to respond to the player's level of joy. The narrative audio was a late addition and we had to invent a way of triggering the story at intervals and I resorted to hacking the item code to play the sound, this wasn't ideal as the items played audio through the SFX rather than the Dialog bus and also via a 3D audio stream. So you are quite right to identify the shortcomings in that system!
Appreciate the comments, when you take the time to give comprehensive feedback like this it really helps