Probably the first time I've seen a " making of " segment in a game jam game lol. Definitely cool to see what your process was like. I'm going to get into it later in this review, but I think having the boss was the right call, and I kinda wish the game had more segments like that.
But before any critiques, I just want to say that this was honestly a damn cool jam entry with phenomenal presentation all around. The atmosphere was on point and the visuals, while soft like that of a children's story book, still had a pretty mysterious vibe to them. This feeling is especially accentuated when you add the little segments of voice acting and the overall sound design as well. Seriously, kudos to your artists ( both visual and audio artists )
The gameplay of needing to manage the clock tower definitely kept me on my toes. I liked how frantic things were and that there was a decent variety to the minigames. However, I think some of the minigames were slightly undercooked to the point that they got a little monotonous, that and they all kinda just got repetitive in general since my strategy never really changed for any of them. The one which definitely comes to my mind is the pipe minigame. It felt like it was basically the same puzzle layout again and again with next to no variation. This definitely made it stand out in a comparatively bad way as opposed to say the gear and vent puzzles, both of which atleast had a decent amount of variation to their layouts.
Even though that feeling of monotony was present, I will definitely say that I did like the strategy of needing to decide which puzzle you'd do to ensure the most amount of time gained and least amount of time spent. That was pretty fun to balance. And it's here that I go back to the bossfight. The rat king definitely hammered this aspect home pretty well. Needing to attack him while also deciding which minigame to do and balance everything was really fun and a solid climax to the game. ( The art for the rat king was also incredible oof )
All in all, I'd say you guys definitely made a damn good game here. Kudos to the entire team