Dissension

Hi! We got a chance to play the first demo over the weekend! This early access demo shows promise of a great game, and we are really looking forward to seeing how this game progresses! 

Here is some feedback from our playthrough!

Music: We really liked the music, on the opening title screen, the music matched the mood very well!

Dialogue: We can see there is a lot of depth in the dialogue!  One comment is, in the beginning of the game, it might be good to limit the dialogue to what is needed to simply "hook" the player in. Basically in beginning, dialogue should be clear and to the point about something interesting and relevant to that moment in order to lead into the game.  Once the player plays the game a bit and gets emotionally invested, then longer and more complex dialogue can be introduced; otherwise the player might quickly lose interest at the beginning if the dialogue is too long-winded so soon in the game.

Art: The pixel art was amazing! We love the style and aesthetic you are conveying, and it really adds to overall world building and "mood".  However, much of the beautiful detail and color is lost due to how dark it is.  For parts of scenes without a lantern, I think they should be a bit brighter, and for scenes with lantern maybe the lantern could have a larger radius.  If anything is "clickable", players should be able to see what they click on - for example, when the player clicks on the gates in the distance when the character was in the boat at the beginning, and the character makes an observation, we couldn't really see the gates that she was observing about.  Looking at your screenshots, it doesn't seem that dark, but we tried on two different computers and the areas with no light were pitch black.

The character animations and the horse / deer animations were amazing though, we are pretty impressed by that.

Inventory: We really liked the inventory mechanic!  We hadn't seen this before and think it's an awesome feature for adventure games instead of just a simple slot-based inventory.  It adds to the realism of the game.  I'm guessing maybe in future the bag might fill up and there may be no places for certain items?  Looking forward to seeing more games use this type of inventory system.

Puzzles: The puzzle elements were nice - the invisible ink on the letter was very clever.  

Tutorials: I think the tutorial for the lock picking should remain on the screen longer and accessible while picking the lock, and the tutorial should be a bit clearer with regards to switch to a different pin (it seems that one needs to use multiple keys to do so, but that wasn't clear in the tutorial).  Also the lock picking mechanic was a bit difficult to grasp - maybe start with a simpler picking, to build up the player's "picking skill", and then can use harder locks in the future?

Bugs: We got one crash during the game, while we were doing the first lock picking puzzle (image attached to this post).  I think this happened while we were doing lock picking and pressing ESC at the same time.  The other bug was after heating the letter to reveal the invisible ink message, if we put down the note in the room, we can't pick it up again, and we were stuck in that room (soft lock)

Overall, awesome work!!