Now that I’m a couple of days out from playing this, figured I’d throw in my two cents on the currently released demo. It’s possible that some of what I’m about to say has been addressed by Tron already, or has been said by someone else, but I haven’t had the time to read through everyone’s posts, so yeah. I’m also a bit tired btw, so if I get some stuff wrong, my bad.
To talk about the story aspect of the game first, I think everything is overall pretty solid. Characters seem to act fairly consistent with what is established with them, and the events make sense from a broad perspective.
That being said, I saw that Tron was trying to streamline the beginning, and I feel like that idea may have gone a bit too far. It starts off well enough, but I feel like the game starts leaping forward in time before I’m really given much of a chance to get to know any of them all that well. I found both Hanna and Rea hard to gage from their initial introductions, so much so that I ended up following Grace’s path at first, since her introduction made it very clear who she is and what her story would be about. Hanna and Rea do have the weight loss thing set up, but that didn’t give me much to go on overall. Instead, all of the more interesting and telling aspects of their characters are in their route sections. I’m not saying that all the information in their routes should be mandatory, but I felt like I’d finally been properly introduced to them once I went back and played their routes. I think more time spend learning about these characters before being thrust into having to choose between them would have been better.
The same goes for Alex’s gaining. I’m not necessarily talking about needing specific stuffing scenes. I just think it all feels too sudden. The character’s supposedly been struggling with this for years, yet now is suddenly the time she makes it happen. I get that this is the inciting incident of the story, so there’s some leeway there, but I just don’t think the game gives a good enough reasoning for why it’s happening right now. Why did she get more confident? Is it her new friends? If so, what is it specifically? I didn’t feel like I was watching her break out, I felt like she just woke up one day and just started succeeding.
One final thing in the same vein, I think a lot of the transitions can come really suddenly. Instead of some of the scenes transitioning naturally into each other, I found myself often having to suddenly get my barings again because I had no idea why the previous scene ended or what the next scene was going to be. The first time skip is the first major time felt this. All of a sudden the game jumped 2 weeks ahead despite the fact that I’d barely met 2 of the major characters, and now Alex has known them for much longer than I have. After which, I started feeling like I should already know them pretty well despite not really knowing much about them at all.
In conclusion with the story, I think the scenes in the game as it is are, for the most part, just fine. I think you need more to connect them together and make them feel like they flow naturally from point A to point B. I know this can be pretty difficult, especially with the choices, but making sure aspects of the story are firmly established at the beginning of the story are essential to it’s success. As much as it might be annoying to look at this part of the game even more, I think it would really benefit you to go back and do some more passes on how the game is structured and paced.
As for gameplay, I have far less to say; though, it’s important none the less.
First, the game probably needs more save slots, but I think people have already mentioned that, so I won’t belabor that point.
What I will talk about, however, is what can be improved with how players interact with the story. At the moment, the basic choices and phone to view stats and check certain things is good and perfectly serviceable. I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with it. That being said, I wanted to give a couple of suggestions to create more interesting systems. These would be harder to implement, but I think people would see a much more engaging and interesting experience as a result.
To start, I think the phone is under-utilized. Other VNs in the past have shown that a phone can be a great asset for allowing the player to interact with the game and story. Giving players the ability to do things like, ignore calls, save and delete pictures, and write their own notes can add a lot. I can give more detail on this another time, but again, this is a really useful tool that I think is being underutilized.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that I feel like food and eating should play a much larger role in how players interact with the story, given what the story is about. For example, if players were able to choose when they ate certain foods, even if they don’t have as much choice in what they could get, could add a lot to the story. For example, the scene where she’s mocked during practice would be much more interesting if the player had decided to eat during it. It could lead to a trade off of having more time to eat if you eat in public, but there’s more chance for someone to comment on it, which could be good or bad depending on the situation. I can talk about this later as well, but that’s the basics of what I was thinking.
Overall, I think this is a nice showcase of the projects potential. Given that this game is 100% in my wheelhouse, I’d like to see it become the best game it can possibly be. I’m always happy to give more feedback on anything, and have some more detailed discussion on what I’ve described here (especially since I wrote this pretty late at night).
Take care, and good luck with the game.
. Forks has piles of content and just needs me to tie it together, whereas Aria is still highly conceptual. It did spark from the cuts we decided to make from Forks early on, mostly because I didn’t know how to code them back then 
Aria has more exploration, a world map, basic crafting and tons of secrets to discover. Rather than a mostly linear story, it’s open-ended and has players working to unravel a greater mystery, or choosing to ignore it for something else. I wasn’t ready to make a game like this when I started Forks.
