SPOILERS FOR THE DEMO
This demo was great, here are some of my thoughts related to my experience playing it
The Office
- the explorable sections of the level were a great introduction/tutorial
- the only thing I would recommend is adding an objective where you consume the coffee you made to teach the player how to use/consume objects in your inventory as I kind of forgot that was a thing in the escape room section (so I was stuck on how to open a letter)
- the elevator section is felt clunky and a very difficult to complete, mostly due to the minigame timer getting faster to a point that I felt like I only got past it due to luck rather than skill
- minigames that consisted of button massing or timing worked well even as the timer got faster
- the recycle bin and pose copying minigames were great on paper but as the timer got faster it felt hard to keep up especially since I was running the game on a wide monitor on Fullscreen, I had to restart and run the game in windowed mode along with the smallest aspect ratio just to make those minigames tolerable at the higher difficulties
- the karate minigame wasn't clear about what I was supposed to do, I do understand how to play it now after a second playthrough but it was learning mostly through tedious trial and error
- overall the type of minigames here are great at least on paper, the only thing that really needs to be changed it the timer for the minigames the final timer speed as it feels too fast for a final difficulty, like the third timer speed is a great final difficulty timer and maybe there should be a slower beginning timer to allow players to learn the minigames
- out of anything in the demo if this type of minigame section as it is right now made a return as a recuring mechanic through the full game or at least Chapter 1 there needs to be an adjustment in its difficulty, the current difficulty is too frustrating to go through and its completion didn't feel earned rather just me getting lucky with what minigames were given to me with the whole process just feeling repetitive.
- There's a bug where if you lose all your lives, when the section restarts the elevator bar does not reset
The Apartment
- great level overall, the puzzles/objectives felt understandable and straight forward
- The TV bits were great and some of the stuff in there makes me curious if there some for shadowing
The Escape Room
- For the most part the puzzles for getting the codes and missing number wheels were creative and there were enough hints to help figure out where to start
- The cotton candy was the only difficult one but that was mostly due to me not reading the posters a
- Frankie routinely checking for something tampered with in the cell is a great challenge and does add an element pressure to complete a part of the puzzle
Other overall thoughts
- Story in the demo was great, can't wait to see what happens next
- Great VA work for all the characters
- Horror elements in this demo for me felt great, scary but it was a good kind of scary that it didn't always rely on being too loud and/or too grotesque to get the scares across, (this is coming from someone who is not a fan full on horror media)
- Other than for the elevator meter bug it ran well with no other noticeable bugs or performance issues for me