hello, polycount is only one aspect of what determines a games system requirements. lighting and shadows are a much larger demand generally, and because this is a horror game, and I wanted the atmosphere and gameplay to benefit from realtime lighting, that came with resource requirements. in the old days, they just baked the lights into the textures, which you can still do today, but that means missing out on things like turning lights on and off, dimming them, changing their colors, and having the lighting on the characters themselves change based on the lighting in the room. It's not "impossible" to do that with baked lighting, but it would be an insane amount of extra work that's not realistic for a solo dev releasing a free game on itch. in addition to that, shaders are required to achieve a more retro aesthetic, because we have to simulate effects via software which otherwise occurred naturally in the past due to the hardware being used, and that also comes at a resource cost. All that being said, this game runs at 30fps on my old gaming laptop which wasn't very good in its prime and can't run most games that I play today, so it isn't that terribly optimized all things considered.