I LOVE BARRY THE BOOKWORM! He's so cute!!
So I feel like with one of these creepypasta-type ARG games, one of the biggest factors in if it lands is art design and sound design. This game NAILS that stuff! The aesthetic and UI design is so delightful and the color pallette is great. Barry's soft gravely voice makes me so extremely happy - I think it's because usually these horror mascot creatures have scary or shrill voices, and barry having such a soft sweet voice is just the best.
The sentence-completing segment was really fun in how it transitioned into horror and I'm VERY excited to see what other horror minigames lie beyond the schoolhouse. I think I got most excited, though, when I reached the simulated operating system, i'm always a sucker for those! Seeing that makes me excited for the depth of different puzzles and story beats we could get in a full game.
The only notes I can really give off the top of my head are that the volume mixing felt a little off, and the lighting on the (REALLY REALLY NICE) settings menu made the shadows a bit too long. But that's small potatoes!
I am really curious to see how this will look expanded into a full game. In a longer game, part of me wonders if Barry should start out a little subtler, so we kind of build into the big scary jumpscares and text, or if the big scary jumpscares and text mean that in a full game, the horror will be escalated even more than that. If Barry is THIS SCARY at the beginning of the game, I feel like towards the end there's gonna be a segment where he, like, jumps out of the screen and chases you around. How far are we going, you know? What are we building towards? These questions excite me LOL
I DESPERATELY need a plush of barry he's so extremely cute. i don't even CARE that he is of the devil! I played the game here on stream at 1:56:05