Three things I liked about this entry:
- The art is SO GOOD. In fact, the whole visual presentation is great. Weather effects, good font, good looking UI.
- The audio presentation is pretty good, too. The music changes to fit the mood of the scene nicely, and is generally pleasant to listen to. There are even occasional sound effects.
- No walls of text or dialogue that isn't purposeful. All text segments were reasonable lengths and kept the action going forward. That may seem like a basic competency, but it's something I have seen a lot of visual novels and story-heavy games fail at, so good job avoiding that.
Three things I did not like:
- There is only 1 choice in the entire experience. Not necessarily the worst, since it's a visual novel, but a little more agency would have been nice. Maybe even an organizing minigame would have been something to improve engagement.
- I'm left with more questions than answers by the end of the demo. While that will likely be addressed by the story eventually being completed, right now I have so little to work with that it's hard for me to say much about the story. I do want to know more about the characters and what all is going on, so at least that is good, but after playing so many other entries where we have a more-or-less complete experience it feels a little odd to only get an intro here.
- Also likely a symptom of this just being the very beginning of the story, but I don't feel like this is much of a horror story. Sure, the opening scene is pretty scary for the main character, but once that gets resolved it's just 2 dudes walking and talking.