Took another run at this!

First impressions

Again, this is not usually my genre, so I tend to look pretty heavily at how easy the game is to understand and navigate without already being familiar with escape-room conventions.

• The core concept is really strong. Combining possession, photographs, fragmented memories, and a missing-person mystery feels like a very natural fit for an escape game. The photography studio also gives the puzzles a cohesive theme instead of feeling like a collection of unrelated riddles.
• The presentation is one of the stronger parts. The darker photography-studio setting, portraits, old equipment, and photo-development imagery all reinforce the mystery well.
• I like that the photographs are not just story collectibles, but are actually part of the puzzle language through negatives, anomalies, codes, and memory challenges. That gives the game a clearer identity.
• I would continue prioritizing quality of life and puzzle readability. I generally think the player should spend their effort solving the mystery, not figuring out whether something is clickable, whether they missed an interaction, or whether the interface is hiding information from them.
• Because so many of the puzzles depend on visual information, I would be especially careful about image scaling, responsive layouts, and clue visibility. A normal UI bug is annoying, but in a game like this a missing or misaligned image can make a puzzle literally impossible to solve.
• Related to that, I saw that some players previously ran into missing images or shifted room artwork in the browser/desktop version. It looks like you have already been actively fixing those issues, which is great. I would just keep regression-testing different browser sizes and aspect ratios because the visual clues are too important for layout problems to slip through.
• The half-second visual-memory style puzzles are an interesting idea, but I would make sure players have a reasonable way to retry them. Memory can be the challenge, but accessibility or simply missing a flash should not force unnecessary frustration.
• I also like having hints available. For this kind of game, I would rather have an optional hint system that keeps someone moving than have a player quit because they cannot tell whether they are stuck on the puzzle or fighting the interface.

Browser version

I think having the game playable directly in the browser on itch is absolutely the right call. Removing the download/install step is especially valuable for a free indie game because someone can go from seeing the page to actually playing within seconds.

I would keep treating that browser build as a first-class version rather than only a convenient demo, though. Since this game relies so heavily on photographs and exact visual clues, responsive scaling and asset loading need to be extremely reliable across desktop and mobile sizes. The comments show that broken image paths and shifted layouts have already caused players to get stuck, so this is probably one of the highest-value technical areas to keep testing.

Overall, I think the concept has a lot going for it. Photographs, possession, memory, and detective work all reinforce each other really well, and the photography studio gives the game a strong thematic foundation. Most of what I would focus on from here is making sure the interface and browser presentation stay completely out of the player’s way so all of their attention can go toward the mystery and puzzles themselves.