Nice job on this, especially for a first project and in such a short time!

I liked the enemy cg, they’re simple but fit the theme really well. Exploration and the secrets were a nice touch, and also the optional party members.

Combat is a bit trivial after a couple of levels, but the final boss was a fun challenge and made me think a bit more. I did run into some small issues with collisions and dialogue repetition, but nothing that would take away from the experience.

Overall, this is a really solid entry, well done!

While I am criticizing the game in the same way I would one made in normal circumstances, I will only be using the ones up to *** to grade it as I understand this was a game made in less than ten days.

I liked the custom battle sprites, they were a nice touch! The legs in the cafeteria were hilarious and helped lighten things up
I liked that the first dorm room served as a sort of HQ for students, but I wish it had gone a bit further by expending interractions, really making it feel like the "safe room" and could have been used to further lighten up the mood. It's important in horror to have moments of levity so that the horror hits that much harder

The theme is Gothic horror, cults are religious horror which is a type of Gothic Horror so the theme was respected.

Here are a few minor problems that I found while playing:

- Exiting an unlocked room or corridor with unlocked rooms will lock the doors again

- You can "use" the dog treats, locking you out of obtaining Scrappy an Scrappy can wear a school uniform

- There are a few collision issues  (If the wall top is in contact with the floor, you can climb it, the walls under the whiteboards and the tables with loose papers also allow you to walk on them)

- I did notice a few typos but nothing too bad

- Maybe change the text on the nurse after 1st encounter as it seems a bit strange she acts like she hasn't seen us before

***

Unfortunately, the only battle that really feels like a challenge is the boss. I feel like maybe diversifying the types of monsters could solve this problem so that the closer you get to the boss, the stronger the enemies get, or you could also limit the use of the Nurse somehow and I wish there was a fight against Chrissy (maybe optional if you carved your hand?)

The door in the cafeteria feels like a red herring for finding the code (which was less fun than laborious to find which I did by listing out all of the possibilities and trying them one by one). My suggestions are to straight up block the player from walking up to the door so that it is clear that it is not meant to be accessed and to fix the code search by removing the numbers from the paper and instead putting the order of  them and then get the player to search how many of each items there are in the cafeteria (you can even amp up the difficulty by leaving a note from the kitchen staff saying stuff like "The kids keep stealing stuff from the kitchens, I bet they're hiding it in the dorms" or something like that that complicates the search without making it tedious.)

It also felt like I was spoon fed the story at times. I liked that a lot of the info about Maya was locked behind doors but the problem is that they are locked by the same key so just getting the bobby pin (Which I suspect may have been a debug tool?) or the keys from the janitor allows you to find out everything at once, and the journal also gives out an awful lot of information at once.  My suggestion would be to spread the pages of the journal (maybe people were getting nosy and she didn't want them to find out what she was doing?) and to spread the keys and hold them behind different enemies or even puzzles. That way, doing the optional ritual also becomes a more rewarding process! :D

One last thing that bothered me were the endings mostly because I feel like the "s" wasn't really needed here. I tried out 7 possibilities and ended up with two almost identical endings. One in which you get beaten by the idol and one for every other path. It's a shame because even unlocking the safe or carving the sigil does not lead you to a different ending. The paths I tried were:

-Accepting the Idol

-Beating the Idol

-Be defeated by the Idol

- Same  three paths but after carving the sigil

-Beating the Idol after opening the safe

While I enjoy stories where things were doomed from the start, I would have liked to see bigger differences in how Leila would reach that bad ending.

Honestly, I sound kind of mean here but I did actually enjoy the game! 

It reminds me of Seven Mysteries by Sang Hendrix and a bit of Look Outside as well. I think there's a lot of potential here and nothing  made me want to stop playing at any point in time which is not the case, most of the time! 

You have something solid here, and I hope you decide to continue working on it (if it wasn't obvious, I want to play your game again) :D

always love the gothic horror + school setting combo :D and the battle sprites are so creepy ! 

also idk if i missed any hints but i can't open the safe (i tried the grocery list numbers)