I still love this series, but the game seemed too small. There are only a few puzzles, really, the item usages were not that intuitive and weren't as involved as they have been in the past (I had tons of fun actually making the jack-o-lantern), and there were a lot of things that were either red herrings or were unfinished. The sliding thing that made different pictures show up on that screen did nothing but kill time, and while that did give the unexpected thing a chance to show up in all its forms, I was still disappointed that it had nothing to do with the actual game. Similarly, the coin and the shrines didn't seem to do anything, but maybe I just put it in the wrong one? I don't know...
Besides that, the NPC conversations were very uninvolved. I felt like the scientist was the only one that said anything important to game completion, and the storyline was only slightly moved by the others, putting some doubt onto the wolf's actions and letting the woodcutter's son say some things in support of Little Red.
It's been a little while since I played the first two parts, but the opening cutscene was so drastic that it created this huge disconnect between previous games and this one. This disconnect was also aided by all the changes to the area (re-using screens from the other games could have helped alleviate this sense of spatial disconnect).
As a personal grievance, I was really bummed with the gravestones. Since you emphasized their blankness so much, I thought looking at them through the bored stone would be gratifying, but they were just covered in silly pictures/made up writing that looked a bit too big to be actual epitaphs and didn't give us anything to go off of. Even if they had remained blank, it would have made them that much more mysterious, because SURELY headstones would bear the signs of the passage of spirits, right?
As a final note, there could have been more music, or perhaps ambient noises, throughout the game. I found a lot of dead silence while I was trying to figure out some of the puzzles I got stuck on, and even if that's what you were going for then a lonely wind could make a noise just to let us know that the game isn't dead.
I really like this series. I eagerly await the next installment. But this one just fell flat. I still give it a relatively good score because I like the series overall, you maintained the creepy, otherworldly feel of everything, and the art was still very nice.
