MZ - Whispers in the Bitter Frost (Horror mystery)

Hey! I just played your game through itch, and I wanted to share my own review here! :kaohi:
Spoiler Warning though :kaosalute:

• Overall, a 3.5 out of 5 experience. I generally enjoyed the game, I liked the story, the concept and the game is very well polished!
• The concept is really nice! Even if it felt tropey, I do think the execution was awesome considering you only had one month to complete it.
• The project is extremely polished, I could clearly tell you did put a lot of effort into making the game feel nice and not just any other rpg maker game. From the maps, to the music, to the SEs, the footstep sounds, the minimalist tutorials, all that, to me, made for a genuinely nice experience, never once did I feel the music was out of place or something like that. And for a game made in basically a month? Yeah, this is awesome, inspite of the downfalls.
• The battles actually require some thinking and timing your attacks, and I loved that, I also loved that you chose a action based battle system, I died quite a few times along the way actually trying to learn, and when I did, It felt rewarding. Characters didn't take too long or too much to die, and that's a win for me!
• To me, the dialogue did feel a bit awkward, too direct and even kind of cringy at times, to the point where, for me, it kind of ruined the mystery and enjoyment of the game, since there wasn't much up to interpretation or especulation. A few typos and repetitions here and there didn't do the game much justice either.
• The character art, although I could tell you're not a very skilled artist at the moment, did make me uncomfortable, with the women having awkwardly large chests. It felt very unnecessary for the female characters to have such accentuated characteristics in a mystery/horror game.
• I did feel that there could have been more gameplay and less cutscenes, I felt that there were a lot of lost opportunities to let the player actually play the game, instead of just watching cutscenes. For example, in the staring cutscene, instead of just making marcus go and get the gas cannister, make us, get it and cook the food, something simple like: Get gas cannister, onion, butter and meat, interact with stove, already goes a long way. Another example is, when Avelina needs to meet with Marcus, there could have been a chase scene where you need to flee that could tie in very nicely with meeting with marcus and having a fight scene with belinda. That would have made the game feel more like, a game in fact.
• The story felt very much predictable, specially thanks to the dialogue and interactables with the game not leaving anything for interpretation, for example, when Avelina and Marcus first meet, them having these thoughts of finding eachother attractive, completely cut the mystery, and the awkward dialogue of "Why do I find another man's wife attractive?" didn't help either.
• Although, the characterization did feel very top notch. I really enjoyed that each character did, in fact, feel unique, for example, how Ricard talks in a very formal almost cold way, in contrast with Marcus and Avelina, that have more casual and intentional, confusion in their way of speaking. I really wish that Avelina's personality was more consistent, her constantly jumping from crying to more assertive to aloof to angry/annoyed, made me have a hard time understanding what was your intention with her. She felt like the typical damsel in distress, can't do anything without a hero swooping in, and that made it hard to respect her character. I think that she deserved more time to shine and I wish we could've have done more exploring with her, since outside of interactables in her room and the dark hallway scene, it felt like there was almost nothing going on with her character.

At the end of the day, for a game made in a single month, this is very much quality stuff, I had fun while the game lasted, and while I do think the characters and dialogue really need some work, I could tell this was made by someone who knows how to use RPG Maker to it's full capacity and that does care about what they're doing.

I really liked your game and look foward to seeing what you do next! :kaojoy:
As a bonus, I also did a quick sketch of Avelina:

@ValentinaSama67 - Wow! First of all! Avelina already getting a gorgeous fanart is the best thing that could happen to this game right now! T_T <3 So thanks so much for that! It means a lot and I'm gonna cherish it!! <3 Now unto the feedback! I'm very glad to hear you enjoyed the atmosphere and gameplay for the most part! But you are indeed right with the dialogue/cutscenes, and how it could use more gameplay on certain scenes! Thankfully, I may still have some time to update the game to implement your neat feedback into the game, especially the ones with adding gameplay and whatnot! I'll also try and see how I can improve characterization during this time, especially with Avelina. I do intend her to be the "FInal Girl" trope, and someone who starts out as a damsel in distress, but ends up being able to save herself in the end. :)

Once again, thanks so much for this detailed and valuable feedback, ValentineSama67! I'm so happy to receive such feedback early in the game's release! <3 :kaojoy:

Very nice character art =.=

Thanks so much for checking out @janatipip and I'm glad you like the character art! ^^ <3

I gave your game a playthrough. It was pretty decent, and you clearly spent some time and effort on it.

To me, aside from the artwork which just isn't to my tastes, the biggest detractor was the errors in English. There were a lot of stray, misplaced apostrophes, some incorrect capitalizing, but a few pretty egregious wrong words:
"What intranation" (both misspelled and one word instead of "in tarnation")
"Taking everything away from you" (instead of "taken")
"Without further adieu" (adieu is French for good bye, the English phrase is "without further ado," without making any more of an issue out of it)

Also, your credits are missing the Gotcha Gotcha copyright text as required by the MZ EULA.

Congrats on completing the game.

Congratulations on completing! I'll play when I have the time as this week is a bit packed!

@ATT_Turan - Thanks so much for playing and I'm glad you had a decent time with it!! And ohh those are some good finds for typos and grammatical errors I can fix! And yeah, I do understand the art may not be to your tastes, as I myself wish to improve upon them more soon. xD <3 And ohh I forgot to credit Gotcha Gotcha! :o I'll try to add them to my posts for the time being! Thanks so much once again!! ^^

@Dark_Ansem - Thanks so much and I hope you'll enjoy it!! ^^ <3