The illustrations are amazing to me, can you share your process? Did you do some sort of conversion on a reference image and clean it up from there? Did you make your own reference images for some of these? I'm absolutely enthralled.

This really captures the feel of classic visual novel games. You absolutely nailed the atmosphere.

One thing I think could make it even more immersive is giving the player the illusion of choice. For example, at the beginning, the phone rings and the player has no real option but to answer it.

In games, we often guide players toward the outcome we want anyway, but the important part is making them feel like it was their decision. Right now, the game makes it obvious that you're forcing the interaction, which slightly breaks the immersion. Even if ignoring the phone eventually led back to the same outcome, simply allowing the player to make that choice would make the experience feel much more natural.

Other than that, great job!

This was a great story, I really enjoyed it. It was well put together, and I think the plot twist was a great addition. Nothing felt cheesy or overdone, and it was an original and compelling story. It also felt very retro so I think it fits the theme well.

Overall the game was amazing, here are some suggestions for very slight improvements:

• If you change the label's "visible_character_behaviour" setting to "Characters After Shaping", text doesn't jump around as you add characters (e.g. if you're tweening the number of visible characters). For me this is slightly more readable and less jumpy
• Personally I would make the scrollbar a little thinner (just a style choice though)
• It would be nice if spacebar progressed the game when there was only one option available to choose from, and also if the "press spacebar to continue" button was clickable with the mouse
• There was one text character which didn't load for me - I believe that the itch server doesn't have a default fallback font, so you have to provide one yourself in the font import settings (e.g. google Noto has all characters I believe)
• There was one missing bbcode tag ending, in the text block that begins "This was Mary's favorite stuffed animal"

All that being said, these are very very very very minor problems. Overall this was an amazing experience, 10/10 from me. I really like being able to press space to speed up the text, thats a great idea. Also the sounds and artstyle were really nice. Just out of interest, how did you make the images? Compress real world photos and then add e.g. the ladder and the family photos over them?

This felt like a movie! The pacing, slow to start but understandable given the world building, really ramped up, and I was expecting jump scares and had to close my eyes on certain points. The reveal at the end was great. 10/10 on  story. Very nice visual novel and great job on your first jam!

I am speechless. Bravo.

I have to be honest, this gave me goosebumps. Beautiful story telling. I teared up genuinely. Very well done story.  Thank you for sharing your perspective. I was really locked in and eager to keep reading. I actually like that it forces you to go word by word even if you speed it up, I think for me that actually help me focus.

Very irrelevant nitpick: I think if the sounds chosen were made to loop less obviously it would be a strong aid to immersion! but this is a small detail relative to the whole picture.

Great work! 

I really liked the style of this, the foleys sound were amazing and created a perfect ambience with the art :)