Ohhh this game was SO much fun to stream!

I love the worldbuilding and wild lore drops. The implication that Markiplier exists in this world made me lose my mind. The former school bully having a "bully" poster on the wall? Iconic. The inclusion of JOHN KRAMER?! I was losing my mind. Just a delight and I never knew what to expect next.

Something that was never directly mentioned in the game but I brought up a few times on stream - I'm not sure if it's intentional but it's extremely funny that everyone who has graduated from the torture academy seems to not have a job in torture. Like, i guess it's really not a thriving field, or maybe it doesn't pay very well. Syzmanski and Tussaud both have jobs in the arts (making games and making wax sculptures), and the bully character still lives with his college roommates, so I imagine if he has a job in torture it must not pay all that well. Obviously the students at this school are just in it for the love of the game, and I can't stop thinking about that.

The group project dynamic was really fun, although I was definitely getting frustrated with Harry and Sarah for not pitching ideas. I think that was latent trauma from my own past with group projects... I might be wrong, but I didn't remember getting a deadline for the school project, so while I was playing I was getting STRESSED OUT when they'd only come up with a couple bad ideas each week. Like, Brian, if your life depends on this you CAN'T just say you only have one idea, and it's to use a hydraulic press! I honestly think as a school-project story, the plot was pretty compelling. I liked seeing the gang workshop their ideas, and the final product that the group ended up with was REALLY creative! It made up for all the bad ideas that Brian kept pitching (sorry, I've decided that I'm a Brian hater). It was also very very fun to pitch my OWN torture devices while streaming, and predict what might happen next.

Critique-wise, I would have loved to see character portraits for the other members of the group. For how much Brian and Dale talk, it was surprising that they didn't get a portrait. The portraits that *were* there, though, were REALLY nice, and I loved the art style. I think the inclusion of brief gameplay portions whenever visiting a mentor was nice, and I would have loved to see a bit more of that, to help justify this game existing as a game, and not a novella or a straight visual novel. Seeing this world explored in the style of a classic RPG-maker horror game would be super neat!

Plot-wise, I guess I could say that while I was constantly surprised by the worldbuilding and lore-drops (and the inclusion of so many wild cameos), I wasn't really ever surprised by the actual story. The group works on a project, goes through a couple ideas, and ends on a big fun idea that wins the contest. Even the "terrible fate" that they say will fall to those who fail the final project is kind of exactly what I expected from the start - it's all pretty straightforward. It's definitely not a bad thing to be predictable, and have things go the way you expect, but it might have been nice to see a little more variance with the back-and-forth structure of pitching ideas and meeting with mentors, and an unexpected outcome might have been more interesting. 

There was a moment near the end of the game where the characters were talking about Syzmanski and how he came up with his idea for his winning torture device while developing his music machine video game, and I thought there was about to be a MASSIVE meta twist where the creators of this game had created a visual novel about their lives to use as inspiration for their own final project, just like Syzmanski did. Like, maybe the characters were specifically publishing this game about their school in hopes that players would pitch their own torture devices, and they could snag one of those to use for their final project. Obviously that's kind of a crackpot theory, but living in that world for just a second got me excited for a wild twist that didn't come to fruition. That's totally okay, not every game needs a massive twist, but what we have here is pretty straightforward. In the end, the character writing and world building were both really, really superb. I *need* to play the spinoff about William - I think following that perspective and having a tragic outcome would be super interesting, and I could see it having a real emotional throughline. 

All in all, I really liked the story of this game! I played the whole thing on stream and I DID do voices, so I'm sorry in advance. i started playing around 20:30

I kept this session to roughly five to ten minutes so I could reach more jam entries and give more developers something useful. This game clearly has much more work in it than I could properly cover during one short session, so consider this a focused first pass on the presentation, readability, and immediate experience.

The torture-school concept is super cool, specific, and very vibey. I enjoyed the narrative setup, the grotesque artwork is genuinely well done, and the droning soundtrack was a great choice for sustaining that uncomfortable atmosphere. The page communicates the theme, but it spends too long on dramatic setup, cameos, and references before clearly explaining the moment-to-moment experience. Still, there is enough personality here that I would actually come back and continue playing when I have more time.

The biggest weakness for me is the UI. The artwork feels considered and distinctive, but the interface does not yet match that quality, which makes the overall presentation feel less cohesive than it should. More importantly, please be careful with accessibility and text contrast. There is too much white layered over white in places, and in a narrative-heavy game where players may be reading for over an hour, the text needs to remain comfortable and immediately legible. Darker dialogue panels, stronger separation from the artwork, consistent margins, and clearer text hierarchy would let the art breathe while making the story much easier to read.

If you have two minutes, come inspect my own engineering mistakes in BEAT BAES. Fair trade, mechanical suffering for mechanical suffering.

Enter the mech workshop · Inspect my mechanical sins

Hello and welcome to Feedback Quest 9! My name is Hythrain, and I'm one of the hosts for this lovely event! I'm also one of the streamers, so both the game and this feedback are being done live! If you want to see the see the VOD, let me know and I'll link you to it when it's uploaded to YouTube!

Being that this game is primarily a visual novel, I chose to do what I normally do for visual novels: focus on the writing to ensure lines are well written and that the logic of the story makes sense. However, I opted to not go about writing down every line I felt had a writing problem and instead just brought those things up while playing. You'll be able to see them in the VOD. Instead, I chose to focus on the story's logic and... honestly, there are some huge problems with it.

First and foremost, one of the things we learn early on is that students have to be both doctors and engineers to "work in this field." Since they'll be in this school for 10 years, I assume this means that after graduation they would then be able to "work in this field" and that the requirements given  have to be obtained before you can start in this school. This would mean having a doctorate and a diploma. I also assume that when you refer to "being a doctor" you specifically mean to be a physician, as otherwise there are a myriad of fields of study that produce doctorates (which is what you need to become a doctor) where you're not a physician.

Except there are two problems here. First and foremost, it typically takes 7 years to get a doctorate to be a physician.  If the characters are 28 when in their last year, this means they were 18 or 19 at the start. This means that to have a doctorate just to get into the school, they would've had to have spent years already studying both medicine AND engineering. In short, they would literally have to all be child geniuses to be where they are which is just so unlikely. So that's already a huge fail in logic.

Another problem is that when you become a physician, you have to take an oath known as the Hippocratic Oath. To boil it down, the Hippocratic Oath demands that physicians will not do anything unethical. This would include doing things that would intentionally cause harm to their patients. or even to people in general.  What this story suggests is that all of these people, after becoming physicians, abandoned their Hippocratic Oath. Besides the fact that doing so would see their doctorates revoked, meaning they'd no longer be physicians and thus would no longer have the qualifications to "work in this field," this is just something that feels insulting to physicians in general. Even in the context of this story, I have a difficult time believing that these people (who, again, have to be child geniuses) would all abandon that oath. It doesn't make sense. I would recommend dropping the idea that you need to be a physician and even an engineer, and rather change it to be that you have to show an aptitude in these fields instead.

I also would argue that literally including a currently living person in the game under the idea that they also went to this school is a bad idea. Why? Because it's so easy for someone to talk about this game's story then for someone else to take that out of context and then spread misinformation about that person. Now you suddenly have a potential libel issue going on. While I appreciate and love the call back to this person's work, you would be far better off changing both the person and the things they made to something made up. You can still do things in a way to make the call back, but don't use their actual name.

Next, I would argue that a deli slicer (what you called a meat slicer) is more well known than a dough roller machine. Deli slicers are far more common and are typically seen more by the public eye. Heck, you wouldn't even use a typical dough roller for donuts but rather a donut cutter roller. Dough rollers are more for bread, pie and pastries. Also, donuts are typically fried instead of baked (they can be baked, but it's less common). Given all this, you would be better off changing it from donuts to something like tarts.

With this all covered, there are some other things I wish to give thoughts on. First, why is it that Harry is the only person in the main group who has artwork? Why don't the others? Heck, why do Marcus and the currently living person have artwork before them? Why was I asked to save early on, given a single line of text and then asked to save again?

Lastly, I know this is intended as a type of visual novel but I feel like there's no gameplay for the player. The only time we get to move around is when we visit people (speaking of, I broke the first visit room. You can walk into the wall and climb all over it. Even more confusing is that doing this is the only way to reach the water cooler), and it doesn't provide anything. You'd be better off making this game in something like Renpy, where all you'd need is the text and the artwork. At least there, there's no expectation of having some sort of control.

Finally, I'd argue that the very first idea suggested is actually a really good one. It just needs more iteration on it (No joke, I told my stream how to make that idea work way better. I won't repeat it here, but legit I had people ask me if I was a serial killer because of how quickly I improved the idea)

And that's all I got. Good luck with your game!

Salve, ho provato il gioco per qualche minuto ha del potenziale, ma il fatto che è solo inglese non lo rende molto accessibile. Se gentilmente potrebbe fare anche una traduzione italiana sarebbe fantastico, cosi potrei valutare il gioco meglio. 2.5⭐️

It's not exactly my type of game, I like the atmosphere, excellent graphics.