itch.io

I checked it out, I'm not really a "new" player anymore so my input on it won't be as valuable unfortunately. But the new stuff is definitely an improvement, it explains the basic mechanics pretty succinctly which is a big help when getting to the next areas, since you aren't fumbling around trying to figure out how to interact with the game while also trying to find the way to progress. I will say I still don't understand the scissors very much, they seem a bit under-utilized? Like there's lots of things you can cut, but I didn't notice it ever really helping after the tutorial. And the first transition where the cat carries you up happens really quickly, I can't tell what's going on it happens so fast, you're exiting one doll then you're exiting another, then the cat is floating away without you, and I barely have enough time to read the text, let alone process what's on my screen.

Beyond that, seems things stayed the same so far, but I have some more observations. Beyond the tutorial, it'd be helpful to isolate some of the mechanics more, give each one space so that the player is only asked to learn one thing at a time before you start asking them to combine stuff. For example, I like the puzzle where it seems you have to combine sing and song-fly, but it's awkward to deduce because this is my first time encountering singing (I don't know what the purpose of the singing doll is), floating (I didn't even know it was a mechanic until I equipped the doll), and songfly. I'm being asked to make a lot of assumptions before I can even think about a solution. You could break this down into like 3 puzzles: first a puzzle where you need to learn how to float in order to progress. Then a puzzle where you need to learn how floating interacts with singing in order to progress. And finally the current puzzle where you have to deduce to combine the two and achieve flight.

Also more broadly, I'm noticing there's a troubling pattern with the game design that will make it difficult to make good puzzles in the future. The way you've built it, the complexity compounds together, because at any point you can carry things inside yourself from one area to the next, you can always go backwards and fetch an earlier doll. Every time a new shell is discovered it just adds more interaction space and there's no point I can mentally shelf something I encountered earlier. For example, if you've played Portal, that game separates puzzles with "material emancipation grills" that prevent you from bringing items from an earlier area into the next puzzle. So I don't have to remember that there was an extra box in chamber 4, because I know if I tried to carry it into chamber 5 it would be destroyed. For a more relevant example, the game COCOON is a puzzle game about entering worlds inside of worlds similar to this game. It is very carefully designed to make it impossible to carry extra puzzle elements forwards in the same way to prevent complexity runaway, and when you can carry an entire world forward with you, they segment that world with one way gates to prevent you from straying off the critical path. 

I don't know how I would address that for LILITH, but it's probably worth thinking about. Improving that would make the task of designing puzzles easier too. You can just design in isolation, and if you want to rework a puzzle or reorder something later you wouldn't have to worry that it'd break something else.