I've been playing the game for three days now and while I'm having a lot of fun one thing is really bothering me. Patients will go to a treatment room and the treatment machine will run through an animation, and the patient will appear to be completely cured, but the treatment fails, or it fails and also kills them.

Why do the character models stay the same when a treatment fails? If a treatment for Animal Magnetism fails, then the patient should be walking out of the hospital still covered in animals. If all the animals are gone then in what sense did the treatment fail? In the same way, patients who go through the Colouriser will get all their colour restored whether the treatment succeeds or fails, but why? Why can't the character model just stay the same when the condition fails (like how Jest and Mock Star already do)? And why don't the treatment machines animate differently when succeeding or failing?

I feel like this was originally the intent, since the Pans Lab machine has two very distinct animations. One where it picks up the patient and violently flings them around, and one where it gently removes the pot. This bothers me for two reasons. Firstly, the two animations seem to play at random and neither corresponds to success or failure or death (I would expect the animation where they get violently flung around to always kill the patient, but I've seen patients have the pot gently removed and then they immediately die. It makes no sense!). Secondly, it bothers me because, again, if the pot is removed then why did the treatment fail?

Ideally, there should be three separate animations for each treatment machine. One for the machine working normally, which is always tied to a successful treatment. One animation of the machine failing, which results in the patient's visible status effect not being removed (eg: still grey coloured, still covered in animals, still with a lightbulb for a head, etc) and leaving the hospital as they came in. And one where the machine violently fails and always results in the patient dying.

Again, I feel like this was the original intent given how the Pans Lab machine (the first machine in the game) is the only machine with more than one animation, but it was cut for time/difficulty. And I understand perfectly that no one is now going to invest dozens of game dev hours designing new animations for a fully functional four year old game. But I feel like it would be very easy to have character models remain unchanged when a treatment is going to fail. So someone goes into the Colouriser but their skin stays grey the whole time. Or the animals stay on someone with Animal Magnetism when they're being shot with the air gun. It might look a bit janky, but it would still make a lot more sense. It really bothers me watching a machine work perfectly and a healthy perfectly normal patient steps out of the machine only to be told that the treatment didn't work, even though it obviously did. For instance watching the long animation for the Colouriser work flawlessly and they step out fully coloured and then the game tells me it didn't work and they still have Grey Anatomy makes me pretty miffed!

Great game apart from that!