Praise:
1) I like the style of the artwork quite a bit!
2) I accidentally hit one of my friends with a rock when I was 6, too. True story!
My parents were kinder.
3) I like the Zelda-esque graphics.
4) I like the sound effects, although they're a bit loud compared to the music.
5) The mystery was interesting enough. I wish I'd had more time to play it, but I got a ways in.
Constructive Feedback:
1) The two trailers are so very different, it feels like they're for different games. One feels like a straight-forward mystery, the other like a revenge-focused violent game. Maybe the game is both? But it might confuse an audience to have two such very different trailers.
2) "My love was taken away from me" is an over-used trope. ("Women in Refrigerators" / "Damsel in Distress") I know it's probably baked into your story structure, so it might be too late to change that, but another motivation that hasn't been done so many times before would be refreshing.
3) Careful with your use of fonts. I believe I saw Chiller and maybe Arial? Fonts need to be licensed, and it can be very expensive! If you don't license them, though, you could get sued. Some game engines come with some font licenses (Unity comes with Arial for example, but only Arial), so you may be covered, but if you aren't, you should change fonts in your game, trailers, websites, etc., to something you have licensed. The Font Library (
https://fontlibrary.org/) has a ton of fonts under the SIL Open Font License (and a few assorted other licenses) that you could use. You will have to add an attribution somewhere in your game, web site, etc., to use them, but other than that they are free. I've used a handful of them. They're very good quality.
4) The window is tiny and non-resizable. It makes it very hard to see what's going on. This is at 2560x1600. At 4K, it would look like an icon!
5) I didn't really like the music. I tried to think about why and there are a couple of big reasons. First, there's a very slight pause between one chord and the next, so it lacks flow. This might be a deliberate choice to emulate 90s MIDI sound, but you can still get that same aesthetic without the jarring elements that couldn't be avoided 25 years ago. The second is that it doesn't loop smoothly. It just cuts off and then starts again a second later. The bass rift that starts a few seconds in also doesn't really feel like it fits.
6) It's not a good idea to key anything off of only color, because about 5% of the population (including me) is colorblind. Games that code off of color are unplayable to us. I was able to tell that the color of some words was different, but colorblindness is highly variable, so you can't count on my experience to tell you if another colorblind person could tell the difference. For this, using bold or italic font in addition to the color is a good idea. If you were using color coding elsewhere, I was not able to tell. The rule for colorblindness accessibility is go ahead and vary the color, but vary something else too (shape or symbol). Candy Crush is a good example of a game that did this well early on but then completely flubbed it when they introduced bombs. (I can't play past this point.)
7) My name ended up being NameLar because I couldn't figure out how to delete the pre-populated "Name" string. Also, could you please add mouse support? Driving text input as though you have only a remote control when you have a keyboard and mouse is frustrating.
Then, when I hit OK, it said "input wrong"?
8 ) It would make the board more interesting if the bushes blocked the pentagram and if the pentagram were a person-like sprite. (Some people will be reactive to it being a pentagram in the first place because they'll see it as "demonic.") Also, if the pentagram disappeared under the wall when it goes through the doorway, it would help with immersion. In fact, it can pass right through the wall on the far side.
9) Why did it ask me what my name is and then call me Rupert?
Developer
