Looks like a game right up my alley from the concept. But it could use a bunch of polishing in my opinion.
Most importantly I think I encountered a hard lock that prevents further progression. After I was in the restricted archives of the library to read the report about the Jezbel incident, my quest log tells me I should return to Alice. But Alice only has the same dialogue she already had when I returned from the church. The one about me smelling like gun powder and stale prayers.
But there are further points that could use some polishing imho:
- text is sometimes illegible.
- Anytime when you interact with an object and there is floating white text over a light background, it is hard to read. When the background has actual white spots (like the white tiles on the floor of the library bathroom) and text is displayed over it (like the option to open the shutters) you need to actually guess the meaning as you cannot read the letters at all. The text could use for example a black outline or a semi-transparent dark background.
- When reading the police report in the library archives it i so long the the first couple of words are behind the "return" button in the upper left corner. Making you, again, guess their meaning. Maybe long text could be scrollable, or be split into several "pages", so this won't happen.
- when an object as you "Do thing? Y/N", the Y-option is selected not when the actual Y-key is pressed, but when the key is pressed where Y is located on an english/standard keyboard layout.
- sometimes the character sprite of the mc gets rendered behind the environment. Examples are the stained glass windows in the church and the back wall of the restricted archives of the library.
- when talking to an npc, you can go to the next bit of dialogue by pressing the "interact" key E. But if E is after the last line of dialoge the mc immediatly talks to the npc again. That leads to a bunch of having to read dialoge twice and in one case to an actual bug. When delivering the quest of getting the food package to the girl in the church, I actually received two notes from her because through pressing E after the last line of her dialoge I triggered her "quest delivered" dialogue a second time.
- there is no indicator whether a particular dialogue option has already been selected.
- when you talk to an npc there is often several "lines of dialogue" of the npc talking and getting a general description of them and what they are currently doing. This is very cool for the first time talking to an npc, but becomes annoying and feels very video gamey/unnatural when talking to the npc again. They could have a shorter version of that introduction and a shorter alternative dialogue like "hey again" or whatever for repeatedly talking to them.
- an especially egregious example of that unnatural video gamey feel is when the priest's shotgun is still mentioned in this text (and shown on the character sprite) after the priest already gave the gun to the mc.
- again on the video gamey feel, in the church you've got like 1 npc actually bordering on the hysterical, 1 npc just not realizing the reality of the situation and 4 hard boiled npcs stoically accepting their situation. I feel like a couple more npcs just like quietly sobbing in the corner/cyring/freaking out (ya know, how presumably some normal people would react to getting besieged by freaking zombies) would go a long way to show the threatening nature of the situation and give these hard boiled stoics something to actually contrast against.
- also the fact that you can easily avoid the zombies when staying moving, but having to solve the puzzle of how to open the crypt involving reading text gives the gameplay in that part more of a annoying rather than a threatening feel.
- there are stats and you can spend points to raise them. But you already have to guess what their names are as only abbreviations are given. You also have to guess what they even do. Some tooltips or something would be really nice here.
Lastly I want to stress that despite this long list of criticisms, I actually quite like the game and I am sure to check out future updates. Like I wouldn't take all the time and effort to write this all out when I just thought it was trash. Then I would just move on. Rather I think it's already the beginning of something great, that just needs acouple of polishing passes to truly shine.