itch.io

So I streamed this tonight, and it has some really good ideas in it. It's definitely rough, but there were a lot of really interesting moments.

Things I liked:

- The use of the blue light coming off the lantern as a way to mask some frankly bland textures and make the environment look eerie and interesting. I absolutely love creative solutions to budget/time constraints that also work in the favor of what you're trying to achieve.

- The lack of an ambient soundtrack, using the silence as a tool to make smaller sounds stand out.

- The concept of a man trapping the souls of children into wooden dolls is inherently creepy, I feel like this idea could be explored and expanded upon.

- The fact that you never actually see a doll move until the end. Yet you resisted the urge to do the SCP173/Slenderman/Weeping Angel thing where it only moves when you don't look at it. That idea is so overdone and I appreciate that it wasn't used here.

- The sequence at the end where you get grabbed and dragged to the table to be turned into doll, that was really well done. 

- I absolutely LOVED that you didn't have it play a really loud screeching sound at moments like the knife being thrown into the wall as an example (which was great btw). That kind of moment is creepy and startling enough without having to resort to a cheap loud screeching sound. 

Things I didn't like:

- I wasn't crazy about how on the nose the notes were, they spelled everything out way too blatantly. Some ambiguity can go a long way, you can give just enough to let the player put the pieces together without being like 'hey so here is word for word literally exactly what happened"

- The literal key hunt near the start where the key is pretty easy to miss. Key hunts are very overdone in horror games and I could have done without it. 

- Minor QA stuff like clipping, overlapping meshes/models/textures (the top of the railing on the stairs for example). 

- Some the proportions of the environments were kind of off. Like the rooms felt way too large, the stairs were very steep and wide, yet the hallways were narrow. It just didn't feel like the internal dimensions of an actual building and detracted a little from the atmosphere.

Overall I liked it and I think that you have a good eye for horror that could be honed further to make some really cool and interesting games. I hope you keep at it!