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YEAHHH!!!! My intuition proved correct! You nailed the homage, honestly. 

• "I was afraid that I was leaning too hard into the Equinox reference..."

Honestly with how obscure that game is it's impossible to go too hard with referencing it. ...Except for doing isometric puzzle platforming, which I'm glad you decided against, lol

First off, ToG's absolutely DRIPPING with atmosphere and I'm loving the slow eerie dungeon OSTs. The puzzles are great, I love how creepy and sad it gets, just, UGH. So good.

I usually don't like saying "Wow it's just like X!" but I can't help but notice some very strong atmospheric and structural similarities to an old SNES game called Equinox. Was that used as an inspiration by any chance? I'm more just surprised anyone would even remember that game, I only hear about it as a footnote in the composer's career.

I can't really glean it from the trailers so I have to ask: does this have horror stuff in it? are there jumpscares? The nighttime portions look pretty eerie but I'm unsure if anything's gonna jump out at me.

I've noticed some rare desyncs playing online, where both clients are waiting for the other to lock in while both are actually locked in locally.

I know there's a lot of edge cases where desyncs or disconnects can happen (especially on spotty internet), so it'd be nice if there was a Reconnect option. If one player is still in the match, the other player could reconnect and it would download the game state (which doesn't seem like that much to download? just variables of a dozen or so entities) and start the match from that point.

Er, you sure you commented on the right game?

Hell yeah, criticism! This'll be useful.

One thing to note is that the FPS counter in the corner isn't necessarily how often it's rendering frames; Gamemaker's weird and has "fps" and "fps_real"; the former shows the FPS it's running at, and the latter is how many CPU steps per second it's iterating. I use fps_real to see how close to under 60 I'm getting during testing, but I didn't actually convey that to anyone. Whoops!

The menu fade is noted! I thought it was fast enough, but I'll consider an option to disable/speed up UI animations, or just speed it up altogether. Also, those tutorial messages were just kinda last minute, so making them only show once is def. a screw up on my part.

(I fixed the menu buttons triggering on press as well as that crash with pressing Q, as well.)

Overall, thanks for the feedback! It'll be a good reference for what I need to polish next.

Thanks for trying the demo out! Glad you enjoyed it too :D

I KNEW i forgot something. You can actually get out of being stuck in islands with the boat if you just go forward long enough (you slooowly push through them), but I'll have to move the spawnpoint for that one out of that.

thanks for the feedback! I agree, the controls are kinda...terrible. I'm getting to work on revamping them, so they're more reliant on WASD/Mouse instead.