Great story, good suspense build...... and OK surprise!  Not gonna spoil the fun! I'll keep watch for updates. 

This didn’t quite do it for me. Stopping right before whet seems to be the core of the story certainly doesn’t help. This does a fine job introducing the characters, but the whole umbrella scene feels out of place. It’s a pretty long discussion before we even got to anything from the main plot. It might make more sense when it’s complete, though. There are some horror stuff happening played quite straight, and then the talking cat appears and is all very casual about the witch thing, it’s a bit goofy. In the end, I don’t really know what mood the VN was going for. (by the way, I vote on Seiji being the witch. The sensation they got from the book was like a manifestation of their latent power or something) The writing suffers a bit in multiple places from mistakes and weird phrasing.

The presentation is alright. The sprites are good but lack in expressions. The backgrounds work, but I’m not sure about the walking “animation” in the dark hallway where we don’t show any sprites. The music and sound effects are used pretty effectively.

The folklore theme isn’t really present besides magic and witches existing. I don’t think this mimics any particular urban legend?

Overall, this is hard to rate, as this is missing a huge part of the story. But I think this could become something good. Keep at it!

This VN is severely held back by the fact that it's a prologue to a larger story; it's hard to make a fair assessment of its characters or story. That said, the setup is decent. It's basically a mystery VN similar to the Ghost Stories anime or Scooby Doo, where a bunch of friends fuck around in a school doing spooky shit, and then they find out. The scene with Seiji and Marcus kinda throws off the pacing of the entire VN, as a VN that's otherwise about a ritual. Maybe it would stick out less in the full game, but I feel like its placement is a bit awkward. Marcus is still a cool character, and I do like him quite a bit. Seiji and Marcus are likable as well, albeit a bit forgettable. Jane, on the other hand, was a bit irritating. She reminds me of Saya from Tennis Ace, where she's basically the sole female friend of the friend group whose personality is supposed to be endearing, but ends up being annoying and rude. The difference between the two is that Saya is from a much longer VN where she has a few moments where she's sweeter and kinder, whereas Jane doesn't have any such moments. Some of the dialogue referencing modern slang can be grating at points. I don't know what about it annoys me, but I just didn't like it. The main twist is interesting, and I'm curious where it heads to, but right now it's just alright. Would recommend if you find the premise interesting.

'Witch Trap' is a slice-of-life, romance, comedy, mystery story. Got to point out that this one is one of those 'first-act' submissions where it spends the time setting up the characters and the premise, and leave us on a cliff-hanger right when the plot is about to start. I think it's supposed to be a a fun riff on spooky shows like Scooby Doo, the Ghost Stories anime, and adding in an element of Among Us.

The story is fairly simple, a group of four college aged friends decide to sneak into the school campus to perform a test of courage/ritual of friendship, cause one of them just wants to do it. The main character is gay for one of his friends, but is kind of developing a crush on the other friend. There's a lot of talking and banter, and then they do the ritual, and oh no, turns out it was a trap (the Witch Trap), and one of them is actually not who they say they are and is going to eat the other 3 if they don't figure out who it is. Then it 'to be continues'. It's actually a really fun premise for a visual novel, one that we've seen before in mystery genres, a story about deception and figuring out who is the traitor/murderer/witch. That being said, the characters aren't particularly interesting off the bat. I think they're supposed to be archetypes of the jock, the nerd, the slacker, and the girl, but they're all pretty muted as far as personality goes, and the motivations for these characters are very flimsy at best. It feels like this might have been envisioned with middle or high school aged characters based on how immature and tropey the seem to act.  It could work with that age bracket if you keep it PG-13. Structure wise, it's weird that we immediately get a full backstory dump from Marcus about how he's blind in one eye, and also always carries around an umbrella, and yet we don't know anything about the main character, or anyone else. Like, I guess he's important to be the love interest, but the whole intro goes on about how the main character is into the jock, Luiz. The plot feels a bit unfocused and not sure what to do with these characters.

The presentation has some strong points and some weak points, that's how I'd describe it. The art for the sprites is fine, it seems to get the personality of the characters across, though the way some of the important details like the blind eye I had to really squint to see it. Also be careful about flipping sprites that have asymmetry. That's also the other thing about this game, the visuals are really dark. Like I get that it's supposed to be at night, but everything is shaded with this dark blue, but you can't really see anything, it's almost as if we were in the void. I'd suggest instead shading with a really saturated blue or purple, rather than just going dark. That way you still convey the darkness without it literally having to be dark. I will say it was neat when the blinking eye animation popped in, and the big 'jump scare' moment of all the characters shaking. Though one detail of the room bobbing up and down as if you're walking the hallway did kind of give a bit of motion sickness. The CG is nice when they're under the umbrella too. The writing was not as strong as the visuals. There's a lot of weird sentence structures and word choices for the characters. The dialog comes across a bit stilted and awkward, like the characters are trying to be quippy, but don't actually say anything. The worst thing I would say is that the text really drags and is  filler basically. Several points and details get repeated, but not even for importance sake, just because it seems that the characters don't have much else to contribute to the conversation. Try to keep in mind, that each line should have some kind of purpose to it: Giving insight into a character's personality or motivations, Moving the plot along, or By being an amusing thing to describe. The other thing, is if the crux of your story is the witch trap mystery plot, why does it seem to take so long to get to it? Why are we starting at the end of the school day, when we could just start at the meeting outside the school at night? Why are we missing chalk and then spending time walking through the dark school alone to get it? This much time shouldn't really be spent on ambience when we're only getting the thoughts from the main character about it. Why are we making jokes in our head when we could be making them to the other characters?

The folklore aspect is a bit weakly portrayed as well. There's talk of a witch, and a spell book, but it's never established why they got the book, or why they decided to do this ritual. I don't want to say this feels derivative, since everything is derivative, but it's hard for me to say that there's something about this story that helps it stand out from other whodunnit mysteries. Like, what do the characters gain by doing this? Are they doing research on the occult? Are they spooky enthusiasts? Is this a dare or challenge to join the spooky club? Are they just bored and looking for something to do? If so, why do they seem like they're being forced to do it?

I think this is a first time solo-dev-ing or working with a smaller team, so I'm assuming that this might have either been a lot of time constraints within the jam itself. It could also be a case of weird project management, where we have 1/3rd of the story for the initial friend banter, 1/3rd for Marcus' backstory, and a 1/3rd for being in the dark and doing the ritual. It makes me wonder if there was an outline on what the major beats of the story were going to be, and if you knew how to get to them. Was the plan always to just get to the end of act 1 and start the ritual, or was that just as far as was gotten done for the jam? I applaud the effort it took to get this much of a first build done for the jam, with all the asset creation and writing, but I feel like more time should have been done during the conception stage to get a good road map of this project.

Gonna be honest, this one isn't for me. The premise is passable, a group of college students sneak into the college after dark and see some spooky bullshit. It's not particularly original but it's fine. These kinds of stories are usually carried by the friend group and their interactions, and I think that's where it unfortunately fell flat for me. I don't know any other way to say it more kindly, but the humor just isn't very good. Many of the jokes just fell flat or even made me cringe. The constant jokes also felt like they took away a lot of the horror and drama from the plot. The writing was kinda aimless, written like a stream of consciousness, and it ended up distracting me from the story pretty often with how often the MC chimes in with a silly joke or observation. There were some moments where the story didn't really flow naturally, such as Marcus and the umbrella backstory. That kinda got plopped into the middle of the story and didn't seem to serve an actual storytelling purpose. What I did like though was the brief scene where they fell into the witch's trap. The sudden red screen and movement was sufficiently spooky. This leads into an intriguing narrative hook, which makes me wonder who the witch is (I think Jane is a red herring and Luiz is the actual witch). Hope this continues, if only so I can get an answer to this.

I think the setup here is quite strong and intriguing, but I feel as though the way it was presented was somewhat lacking - I feel as though the story reaches the "to be continued" screen before it can properly sell us on the concept - the readers are left with the vague threat of death and magic, but don't see much to actually prove its existence beyond a teleporting cat (who the characters have no real reason to actually trust). I would have liked to get to see the witch a bit more in the little we did get of the story, in order to get a better grasp of the threat it represents to our characters.

Writing-wise, I think it's slightly lacking - the repeated spelling errors (alongside the odd font choice) make it hard to follow the story, and the characters have a tendency to be a bit too literal (the dialogue during Marcus' backstory felt a bit too stiff... though it did result in a fantastic gag about the potential umbrellas have as weapons). Speaking of the umbrella gag, I do think the story's sense of humor is one of its strong points - there's some very solid gags here, though it does make me wonder if the story will keep them up when things get more serious, or if it'll fade away as the characters realize the severity of the situation at hand.

Regardless, I'm looking forwards to seeing what the story will look like when more of it is out - but as for now, I'm left wanting more from what we got.

I found that Witchtrap was an enjoyable game, for what it is. Unfortunately, I think the game is largely held back by the fact that it's essentially just the intro to a much larger project, and wasn't able to put enough focus on either the story or characters as a result.

I can't be too mad about the grammar and spelling issues, knowing that English is probably not your first language, so I won't harp on about that, instead I'll say that I think the game's pacing is excellent; I felt that every event lasted just long enough to not overstay their welcome, but also short enough that I was left wanting to see what would happen next. The tense moments in the story, however, are undercut by the snarky dialogue of every character in the game- with maybe an exception to Luiz, who's the only one that didn't feel like he was constantly throwing out one-liners, but that also might be because he was given the least amount of focus out of the whole cast. On that note, while I did enjoy some of the banter between Jane and Marcus, especially the 'pawjobs don't count' line, it often felt like everyone's personalities were blending together too much to differentiate themselves from their roles in the friend group.

The concept is extremely strong, and I loved the reveal that one of the 'players' is actually a witch. I love deduction games and trying to work out which of the four characters might be the witch seems like it's going to end up being really engaging- especially if there are different routes. I'm excited to see where this project goes from here, I'll definitely be keeping a close eye on it in the future.

Also, I already really like Marcus, so if anything happens to him, it's on sight.

⭐⭐

WitchTrap came off as too much of a first draft to stick with me. From strange writing on all fronts to uneven presentation, this project fails to make much good on a pretty interesting set-up. The game actually takes quite a while until it gets to the core of the narrative: a "werewolf-style" deduction game between four friends. While I believe the VN is correct in spending time setting up these characters before this, it errs on two fronts in my opinion. Firstly, it only really establishes two of the four "players" (MC included), weakening the sense of doubt and dread that the switch up could evoke in readers. And secondly, I found these characters are plain unlikable; they constantly argue and mock each other to the point one has to wonder if they are friends at all. Perhaps some of this could be course-corrected or explored in a longer format, but the current word count just doesn't make a great first impression. Presentation is actually far stronger, its use of transitions and visual effects managed to wow me. This VN is just not a strong package and is hurting for many more revisions. Hopefully it can improve with future updates.

Despite being a short story, you've given it a suitable cliffhanger to make us wonder what awaits the guys in the next update.

Besides creating a suitable atmosphere in the scenarios, the only thing you could improve would be the music.

I think I only heard one or two tracks that were in the game, which can get a bit annoying due to its repetitiveness in certain moment.

Good luck with your new project, GrCat!

Don't leave it paused for too long, okay? :(

Mom, can we have ghost stories dub?

We have ghost stories dub at home.

Ghost stories dub at home:

Themes and such

Over all, compelling, nice, short read, great atmosphere and great ren'py code, I will be looking forward to more updates awa awa