I finally read this portmortem and wanted to comment on this specifically!
I have heard people in the TTRPG space talk about the importance of game presentation, as in the stuff you see before you play, to be more important to the experience of the game than a lot of people realize. I think there’s a specific word used but I forgot it! I’ll go with before-game presentation.
The title is an obvious one. If applicable: the blurb, the little one sentence tagline, the cover art and header, the palette and graphic design of the landing page (on itch.io, steam, kickstarter, etc), the thumbnail, the gameplay screenshots, the categorization tags for genre, the estimated time to play. And so on.
All of these prime a potential player for what to expect when they actually play, and of course whether they are interested enough to play in the first place. As someone who’s scrambled to come up with the above things and just thrown in some random placeholder to fulfill upload requirements on itch.io and IFComp, I often need to remind myself that these aspects are not to be taken lightly or as throwaway things to get out of the way. Not saying that you considered things that way! But I know many who do.
I personally felt unintentionally misled by the before-game presentation of Detective Osiris, which I elaborated in my review. I think it’s likely that if the game blurb had aligned further with the actual game, I would’ve rated it higher for what it was rather than what I had expected it would be.