Thanks everyone for your support! It's an amazing morale boost to hear someone likes the outcome of your efforts! The Rock Paper Shotgun and IndieGames.com posts blew me away

Specifically thanks to
eigen, hritter, radiatoryang, Noyb, Useless Shotgun, freakoftheuniverse, Bird59 and orihaus for new character sheet contributions! We've got a lot of interesting characters now.

(would NOT want to meet some of them

)
I'm sorry about the glitches and quirks. As it's just a prototype with almost zero time direct playtesting feedback, I hope it's understandable. Have no fear, the full version will be thoroughly tested and debugged.
As for word catching - there are about 4 modes randomly variating now. I'd like to have a different mode for each stage (with rising difficulty). There are plenty of options aside to simple catching - show a word ripped in halves, then drag halves together before they dissappear / show multiple parts of multiple words, choose correct halves to fit together / all current modes with time attack / letting the word lighten up by dragging it near multiple light sources scattered across the screen ...
The point is to give the player a hard time focusing on the meaning of the words and assigning it to a character while catching the words.
Perhaps if instead of catching the words, you had to rearrange the words of the sentence into the correct order. Well maybe not every individual word, but groups of 3 or so words. That might encourage the player to focus on the meaning of the words more.
Great idea, thanks!
As for passenger variance - each train line will feature a specific subset of passengers (you won't meet them elsewhere). The point is to have as diverse group as possible to make each passenger's lines distinguishable from others within the same group. Also the passengers will appear in pseudo-random order to avoid meeting the same character twice in one game. This largely depends on the final number of passengers in the game, of course.
I'm a bit confused about some responses on the
RPS though. It seems that some people think of the Passengers as a self-proclaimed piece of art. I don't have any such intention (and/or skills), I'm just aiming to provide some interesting atmosphere without any specific deeper meaning.
As for not-enough-gameyness, I'm aware of that and quite satisfied with the current status - adding enemies, powerups etc. would not fit the current gameplay. But if you have any ideas on how to make it more gamey (while supporting the current atmosphere), I'm eager to hear them!
What I'm thinking of now is:
- adding more word-cactching modes
- have some development element that would carry on across the stations (showing your current progress, possibly a motivation to keep on playing)