Brian White, you beautiful genius, you’ve done it again. Fantastic game, would absolutely recommend to anyone.
Now, to Brian specifically (no one else read further cuz it’s gonna spoil stuff), here’s a couple of hyper specific nitpicks I had throughout playing, because I enjoy nitpicking these kinds of games, especially when they’re so good. So:
-Having the tutorial be the same for each of the three Hotel Orpheus games is a completely valid choice, it gives continuity and cohesion. However, I think you might be missing an opportunity to establish a slightly different immediate tone to the player. Small changes, like the level of decay of the flowers, the exposure or casted shadows of the objects, the expression of the doorman/wolf lamps, and especially the background music, are all places I think you could make small changes that could be good for spooks or immersion.
-The inventory should definitely be a side scrolling bar along the bottom rather than having the suitcase icon that has to be clicked every time, both for convenience and to keep the player aware of what they have while exploring the game. Maybe have a button that pulls up the full array for purposes of combining or inspecting, but for using items it’s clunky.
-Love the mirror person design, but fyi, orange horns and grey skin evoke memories of Homestuck for me, which is a significantly different tone than this game. Although, the shape of the horns is the same as the scariest Homestuck character, so idk. Either way, the solid orange color draws a bit away from the detail of the face, I’d recommend changing the color, adding some variation (wear and tear, dust smudges, etc) or lowering the saturation of the horns if this is gonna be a recurring character.
-Ooh, beautiful fluid looking animation on the mouse scrambling to get the key! That probably took a while, nicely done there.
-No need to put quotes around a few of the thoughts, the more personal nature of the syntax should suffice to differentiate it from the instructions. Plus you seem to also have quoteless internal speech, such as the opinion on the state of the chair. Maybe make one a different font if you want to be sure of distinction, but quote marks are best left to separate spoken dialogue from internal. I guess the character might be saying these thoughts aloud, but since all other sound is either diegetic (wheel squeaking, drawer opening, tv reporter) or benefit from the uncertainty of whether they’re diegetic or not (child laughter, hallucinations), having the quotes implying spoken statements and not actually hearing them in the audio can cause some dissonance in an immersion breaking way.
-That purple chair does not look filthy whatsoever, despite what the text says, I will not stand for this! 😂
-Drawing the symbol and the transition into the next room is SO GOOD
-I don’t think the flickering of the light adds anything to the mood or atmosphere, it just gives people a headache.
-Marble sudoku is a bit difficult to get to recognize a correct answer, perhaps there are a few possible correct variations and I just did one that you hadn’t programmed to recognize? I had to skip this one, even though it was correctly solved, which was weird.
-When you exit out of an item you’re examining, it should reliably bring you back to the items, rather than randomly exit out of both most times the x button is clicked. That way you can catch up examining when you’ve picked up a series of items, with half the clicks.
-What’s up with the tarot cards puzzle solution not matching the layout indicated by the paper next to it? (Note from later, oh gosh darn the mirror agh that makes sense. Maybe darken the backwards letters to draw more attention to their backwardsness?)
-Some of the rotating key options are a bit too similar to each other
-Redundancy of having “Melok” discoverable both by the cassette tape and the scribbled out paper (okay thing to have, just stood out as odd)
-“Hurting this man won’t solve anything” I just shoved a pin through the back of his neck to get a cassette tape, whaddya mean, seems like hurting this man is a very effective solution
-OK FINAL NOTE FOR STORY: my characters motivation for summoning the demon seems nonexistent, I had no idea he was gonna drop a hotel card. From the perspective of the in-game person they haven’t done anything to show an affinity for evil and danger from the beginning, nor have they shown it developing through the course of the game. The voodoo doll and gutting the fish were both good ways to establish that they’re not a person who is at all opposed to taking advice from demons, but summoning them is taking level of risk and no obvious reward that seems out of the blue. I can see two ways to resolve this: either the pov character should have that affinity/development or they should be deceived about the nature of the incantation. The latter seems a lot easier to pull off, removing the “summoning ritual” title of the science book scrap that gives the layout and chant, maybe scatter some slightly off implications that it’s a banishing ritual.
If you see this review and you’d like me to beta test any future works of yours, lmk in a reply how I should go about signing up for such a thing! Great job.
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