Very polished and ultra-charming!
I was gonna write that the map layout for the demo could benefit from being (a lot) tighter, but it seems that others have already addressed that (and for the full game, the very open layout seems like it will be part of its appeal, especialluly if there's ample enough content and non-linearity in regards to accessing it.)
This is the only game my kid (4) played through (almost) entirely unassisted, btw.
I'm not sure if the game's intended for an early childhood/all-ages audience, but we enjoyed it on that level very much.
On one hand, the difficulty curve is *very* accessible, and the gameplay quite cute. But on the other, the titlescreen aesthetic feels more serious, and I was always expecting the overall mystery to take a suddenly dark turn.
That said, the only thing that caught me off guard as I was reading the word balloons to the kid was the shootout and that boss's dialog. The violence/gunplay of which seemed to come just far enough out of left field to feel uneasy, but not far enough to feel absurd or humorous (which that unease may very well have been the intention; in which case, it was successful). Even though it occurs within a book, it felt more violent/real/high stakes than, say, in CatMercs which revolves around a screen full of bullets (which I admit I didn't think twice about while playing with the same child 😅)
Anyway, I'm not writing persuasively one way or the other. Just leaving the account of our gameplay here to give you a look at how it went down. We're both very much looking forward to the full version, btw.