Only a couple hours in, but so far I'm honestly quite impressed.
The music composition is good, albeit held back a bit by the midi quality (some of the instruments sound distinctly synthetic to me, particularly strings).
Art style's good as well, and the UI/menus are pretty. However, function feels like it takes a back seat to form in some cases: Menu elements and text don't all have enough contrast to really pop. The sliders for things like text speed/volume aren't obvious at first. Making the Celtic knot sliders a different color, like a brooch of burnished silver or gold, would probably help in that regard. Though I do appreciate the antique book aesthetic you're clearly going for.
Writing's also rather good so far (I'm only up to chapter 1-13). It's interesting that you chose such a difficult setting and time period. For the most part, anachronisms/Americanisms aren't too bad or noticeable, at least to my pedestrian level of knowledge. Just some little random things, for example, it did strike me as odd that a girl in early 1900s Scotland would know about recluse spiders. I didn't think Scotland has any, especially back then.
At any rate, I'll probably write a proper review and post it on Steam after I've finished at least one of the storylines. If the game continues to maintain its current level of quality and polish, I'd say this was worth the purchase price.
Hey, thanks for the specific feedback, I've passed it on the lead dev! He'll see about the recluse thing and probably change the slider handle colors since we're editing those right now anyway.
I don't think it's midi, but it definitely synthetic, our composer can't afford a real version of every instrument he uses and I think he only plays the piano, drums and guitar, if I remember. He's pretty good though, and I think you'll be surprised by the number of tracks.
We picked the setting and time period because our lead dev is a huge history, archaeology and traveling nerd. He's been to most countries on the planet (he filmed a video of petra that made it onto the bbc!) and thought the Scottish hills and fae lore would work well in a game all about transforming into animals. It's a great foundation.
Post great war would also let us feature an interesting protagonist with some actual backstory (rather than the usual blank slate for the genre). There's also a dirth of men for areas hit hard by casualties as well, so it helped us setup a slightly more realistic way multiple women would could all fall for the same guy (though not all at once). It's also not done also ever - I don't think there's much to compare to us because of it. A lot of our locations are based on actual pictures he took while out there so we have gotten contacted by Scots who recognize stuff, or gone and got more pictures for us.
There are a few anachronisms but we try not to do things that are completely out of the sync - some things we nudge a few years forward or backward, we show Jessie with microphones that weren't invented with 4 or 5 years in promotional stuff for instance. There probably weren't any flapper ladies outside of the city in the 20's, and she probably wouldn't have a record player. They probably wouldn't be that clean either, but we're willing to cheat where it makes sense.
Anyway, looking forward to your review!