This is a solid 9/10 game for me.
The storytelling is poignant, and Berlinist did a fantastic job with the music.
If you like immersing yourself in a world that shows you its story, this is a great game for you.
My only complaints are the following:
1. No sprint?:
The pacing of the game works wonderfully for a first time playthrough, but when you replay parts of the game looking for secrets you missed during your first go, the game can feel very slow. The whole game, I was holding my breath for a running ability (which I thought we would unlock after beating the game once) to allow for faster replays of earlier chapters, but I was sorely mistaken. This leads me to my second point...
2. Unintuitive secrets
MOST OF THE TIME, I loved the way the game communicated with you. Subtle hints for those who ventured off the beaten path, small yet noticeable animations for possible interactions with objects... but I felt at times that some secrets in this game feel very... unintuive, for lack of better word.
For example, when going for that Inuiki statues achievement, I couldn't help but think that the game could have made it a LOT clearer that there was a point in destroying them. The Magic Fowls give you that lovely jingle when interacting with them, and I felt like the other secrets in this game should have also given you an unmistakable sound / cue that you were progressing towards *something*.
As an additional example, during my first go at level Three, I fed our little friend almost all of the apples (I had missed a single one). After having done all that, and nothing happened, I simply assumed that there was no point in feeding it, aside from simply wanting to. Imagine my surprise when I checked the achievements for this game, and I saw that there was an achievement for it! A jingle, maybe one that goes up in pitch as you progress more through finding secrets, would be a great way of letting the player know that they're on track to "completing" a secret in the game.
On that note, I also really would have appreciated some way of tracking my progress when collecting stars / mementos / secrets in the game. The menu would have been a great place to have a tracker of some sort, letting you know at what checkpoint of a level you are, and if you missed something.
If you couldn't tell already, I have collector's anxiety, so I feel a strong urge to find all the secrets in a game, to experience it to the fullest degree possible. Upon completing areas, I was bummed to find out I had missed secrets, and even more disappointed when seeing that I could not backtrack. (Of course, this is somewhat remedied by the chapters system, but it still implies a lot of redundancy).
Now that I think about it, maybe things would have been easier if the player was faster, or if we had some control of the camera to look around, or even some in-game way of knowing if we fully "cleared" an area and found all of its secrets!
These were my nitpicks for a fantastic story-driven game! Once again, I had a lot of fun with it and I simply wish that replayability was made a little more convenient for the player :) Great work on the story, the visuals, the animation, and the music! This was a very immersive game that took me around 4 hours to complete.
