Really short and sweet but a huge amount of work clearly went into it. After the opening I consistently adored how detailed and expressive the characters are and how well the atmosphere works despite its simplicity. Overall much higher quality compared to some other indie VNs I've played recently. Loved how I kept finding new routes and rooms by just trying random stuff, and their endings ended up being so different from each other (also K7 is canon in my heart idc).

This is all just a prologue, so I'm eager to see what the devs have cooked in Paper Lily and continuing the thread of these mysterious Golden Letters.

There's not much I can comment on other than this was a very good demo!! The gameplay was nice and the horror set me effectively on edge. I definitely felt like I might die at every step of the way, sort of like the vibes I would get with Misao or Corpse Party but this seems way better than either of those. I hesitate to give this a perfect score just because it hasn't shaken me to the core THAT much and there's a couple glitches but I have no complaints! The question now I ask is do I wait for Steam launch of Chapter 1 or just play the itch.io version.

Pretty good. The pixel art was really nice and the animations were smooth. I like how it kept me scared without doing a whole bunch of jumpscares. It was also good at hyping me up for the full release, what with all of the other doors in the mystery zone that are completely unused, and the way it all ties back to the garden you see in the opening. There was a lot of clunk to it though, like having to hold the up arrow to go up on stairs, or having to navigate into your menu to use an item on something in the overworld instead of just interacting with the thing in the overworld to use it. And to be honest, the main character kind of annoyed me, but that's probably just because I kind of hate the 'smug anime girl' trope. But it also wasn't a deep enough of a hate where I felt like what happened to her was deserved or satisfying. It's in a really weird middle ground.

And for a really weird nitpick-- I kind of felt a really weird disconnect between the game art and the UI, like the UI was too clean and sharp and HQ for a pixel art game. I feel like it's something that would be remedied if the UI was also in pixel art but I understand that's a design choice that doesn't really matter in the end. Same could be said for the ambient smooth lighting effects but I know that's a thing some people really like in pixel art games so it's not something affecting the rating.