Hi, I've been lurking in this site for a while but finally felt compelled to post after trying your demo.
First, I want to say that I really enjoyed it overall. You and I share similar tastes and, as an aspiring dev myself, I understand the amount of work this stuff takes. I'd like to give you my thoughts both from a gamer and dev standpoint.
Starting out, I do agree with the general sentiment that Kassiah so far seems to be a more compelling character than Aline. The running theme of this game is cocky and overconfident characters getting in over their heads and, as a newbie, Aline doesn't have the experience, exposure or reputation that Kassiah does to warrant that cockiness. However, if part of the initial phase the full game is to build up Aline's reputation and arrogance then it could work out well either way. But, so far, I'm liking Kassiah's design just a little bit more.
Next up, I really like what you did with scene compositions. You seem to be rendering and cropping different sprites and combining them with backdrops to make a scene. Gives the game an old-school adventure vibe, kind of like The Longest Journey. The only thing I'd suggest here is if you can maybe improve icon legibility on the environments. Prior to writing this post, I replayed the entire thing again and only then did I notice that the bar has a back area with a pool table and jukebox. For some reason, my eyes just completely tuned that icon out the first time around. If the icons slightly animated or had a background or something, they might stand out a bit more.
Speaking of icons, something that continually tripped me up was the combat iconography. I think a small touch here would go a long way. You essentially have 3 groups of actions: actions that can be taken at will (attack, defend and observe, scan enemy, visions of lust), actions that raise/change your status (taunt), and actions that require specific statuses to use (hot taunt, slayer move, surrender). I think it would make things a bit cleaner if you did not use pentagrams for the second and third group of actions. The first group already has its own unique icon: the swirl, and I think separating the second and third group by giving each group their own icon would be a big improvement. Maybe keep the pentagram for the third group but use a different icon for taunt and any future actions that you might add that change player status.
Now, from a design standpoint, I know this is a demo so I'm not sure you've fleshed out the systems in this game yet but I want to warn you about positive feedback loops in stats/attributes. This is a thing I see in a lot of these games (or even non-H commercial titles). You need a certain stat to get a dialog option to appear and when that option is used, it raises the very stat it required. I think its important to mechanically separate options/actions that require a certain attribute vs options/actions that raise/lower that attribute.
For example, I needed a certain arrogance attribute to do the arrogant pose in the bar. So I gained hearts of arrogance, bought the attribute and did the pose. Doing the pose raised my arrogance. This might logically make sense but from a gaming standpoint it just pushes you harder into a specific path or makes it harder to get into a path in the first place (the "need money to make money" problem). Instead, I suggest she gains hearts of arrogance by doing things that improve her confidence (killing monsters, completing missions, solving puzzles, etc) and then she can do the cocky posturing that high confidence/arrogance warrants. That posturing then has side-effects that are not just raise the same arrogance stat (could be mechanic side-effects and/or story side-effects). The same should apply to the other hearts. But, of course, that's just a suggestion and you're free to do what you want in your game.
As far as bugs go, there were a few. Dialog would sometimes just repeat over and over again for 5-10 repeats until things progressed again. Also, sometimes icons in the scene were still clickable even while dialog was occurring. So I would click randomly to progress dialog yet invoke the action in the scene. I actually suspect these two bugs might be linked. I also had one lockup. The firs time I entered the manhole, I got the first sewer scene and after a couple of lines of dialog, the game just didn't respond to anything. No icons, no dialog, nothing. Had to shutdown the game and reload. Second time dialog progressed properly.
Just food for thought, but again, I enjoyed it overall and even got some ideas/inspiration for my personal project which shares some similar themes. Good luck and I look forward to seeing more updates.