Mirage

Some feedback after playing:

• game concept is great, I definitely want to see more of it.
• the art is nice and clean, I like main character too. The backgrounds are ok, though I think they should work as establishing shots that introduce a larger and space but rapidly transition to a more local focused thing afterwards. The library was a good example of this, while the restaurant/home/workplaces could have used this.
• definitely you gotta find a way to massively cut down the file size, its is waaaaaaay too massive and has no content that warrants it. This should be reduced to under 100 MB or less by any means. the 10 GB size is a major obstacle for many to download and try this, it needs to be sorted.
• i think splitting the project into separate versions of F4F and F4M version, or just focusing on one would be greatly beneficial, to keep development more focused, especially if its causing the need for audio files to be recorded twice for each path.
• the various hypnotic effects were neat, the dissassociation stuff and the glitchy stuff. The session at the end was a bit mid imo, mainly due to the format where it covered the whole screen with a giant spiral whereas what I would have wanted to see is having the main character be zoomed in, there'd still be a visible background and a subtle overlay vigenette layer that puts a transparent spiral over the scene. Basically I'm saying it didn't feel consistent with the rest of the game and didn't feature Her as a focal point for the viewer to latch on to mentally and become brainwashed towards.
• a common mistake in VNs is to speak for the player character, put words into their mouth, making it feel like I have less agency and feel less immersed in playing as my character. I didn't get the genuine experience of *choosing* to give into the trance/brainwashing, which I felt was supposed to be the main selling point of the game. I think the writing and structure for how the game flows could use improvement in this regard.
• there was also a mild typo in the first restaurant scene if you chose female and ones of the lines said "his" instead of "her".
• The various emotive voice clips throughout didn't feel like they added much to the experience. I think better usage would be to play a spoken sentence during transitions that nudges the player towards a specific thought/direction, either as to prep them into the right mindset for the next scene or to slowly build up tension/relaxation towards an upcoming deeper hypnosis session during a specific later moment in the game.

Keep working on this passion project, I think it has potential though some reworking of its design and standardization could have a great impact on improving it from something that is good to something that is excellent.