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Sorry for the late reply! I'm so happy that it was helpful~

And no need to apologise, bugs are unavoidable part of development, especially on a small scale indie project where you don't have access to QA testing

I wrote a review of this game as part of my yearly media round up on my twitter, that I felt would worth sharing here! This was one of my favourite games I played this year and I'm so happy to have found it on the racial justice bundle!

 https://twitter.com/kaijidatingsim/status/1339895554789224449

Just finished the demo. I was so surprised by how long it went on for, every time I was sure it would end there was still more, an incredibly generous demo (or maybe I'm just slow...)

I love the approach this game has to teaching so much, I've been studying Japanese with duolingo for about a year and while it's a very useful app for practice, I felt like it never really taught me grammar rules properly. This game does a really great job of pacing learning and practice, with easy to understand explanations spaced between lots of chances to practice what you've learnt. The story is immediately a really interesting one, I think it's very common for language games to place you as an outsider looking in, so it's a refreshing angle to play as someone trying to regain their own language, not learn a new one. It's a very sad concept to lose your native tongue, but a hopeful journey to learn it all again, so it has a kinda bittersweet hopeful feeling, and grounding the lessons you're learning in a personal narrative like this is a great way to help you remember what you're learning, I think giving an emotional context to something is a great memory tool.

I did run into a few problems with the game, both with glitches and design. 

I played it in English, and in quite a few places the text that was supposed to be in English was in Spanish instead. For the most part, I was able to figure out what it was asking of me fairly easily based on context, but it did cause some confusion sometimes. I'm unsure if this is just the English translation being incomplete or a glitch confusing the two builds of the game or something. 

I also had a game breaking bug where, when I was exploring the first outdoor section, I walked past some cones on the right, accidentally walked into an out of bounds area and couldn't get back into the world. Luckily I had saved fairly recently so I could just reload an old save, and I'm not sure whether that's a replicable glitch or a rare occurrence. 

In terms of design, when I started up I was a bit unsure where to look when I was asked to check my books, it took me a while to get my head around the interface of the phone, that may just be me, but maybe a clearer explanation could be helpful. I also had difficulty knowing how I was meant to space my sentences when typing questions/answers. I've only ever typed Japanese without spaces, so I sometimes found it a bit tricky knowing whether I was supposed to write, for example, "ポケットの　中に"　or　"ポケットの中に". I do get that encouraging people to use spaces before they start learning kanji will make it easier for them to break up the different parts of the sentence in their head, but maybe allowing them to enter both options with and without spaces/in kanji or in hiragana could help reduce some frustration of not knowing what you're doing wrong. The most difficulty I had was with when you had to ask how to say a word in English, e.g "「たたみろーど」は　えいごで　なんと　いいますか。"　The problem I had was it took me ages to realise I was supposed to include the「」and spent ages thinking I had done something wrong with how I spaced the rest of the sentence. Maybe either allowing people to type the answer both with or without the「」could make this a bit easier, or maybe explaining at some point that you need to use them? 

The only other problem I had is I thought having to redo the quiz in the library if you got even one answer wrong was a bit harsh, especially cause most of the mistakes I made were with spacing not with the grammar itself. Everything else worked for me I think, and I hope they're problems that were either specific to me or can be easily fixed. 

I'm really excited to see where this project goes, I think it's an incredibly helpful resource and it's already helped me to get a much better understanding of grammar, so I'd love to see what happens when it moves onto some more complex sentence structures, as well as whether Morita and Tanaka will be able to regain their language. 

Wishing you all the luck with development, and hoping you manage to get some more eyes on this really cool game!

Ah thank you very much! I tried some combination of that but I couldn't find a space key on the keyboard I'll look harder! Thank you, really looking forward to finishing it!

Hi sorry to trouble you, I'm having so much fun with this game but I'm completely stuck on the password to give to the angry tree. I've been trying for a day to think of the answer now and I don't think I'll be able to finish the game without asking for help. Could you possibly let me know?