Interdimensional Vending Machine

I've been trying to play this for a couple days (Windows download), and, unless I'm doing something wrong, it appears to be impossible to progress any further than the first transformation of each line?

I can achieve the first progression of the ones I've tried fine enough (Healthy, Overweight, Parasite, etc.), but after consuming between 1-3 of those same item types needed for their evolution, the protag instead reverts to normal again.

With what is already admittedly a lot of time each run being spent toward gaining the specific items necessary to evolve, and the gameplay loop not being much more than Sitting and Waiting for this to happen, it's a bit disheartening to find that the core content of the game is inaccessible without really understanding why.
Hopefully as development continues this game can iron out its shortcomings a bit further, but as of now for me personally the experience is closer to that of an endless kitchen timer.

you should add a drag effect to the coin i swear it will just add a little dopamine hit whenever you put a coin in

I love the game's vibe, this is creepy and dystopian. 

EDIT: ... Lost a run because of the Starving Man on the Empty Street > Left Arrow part of the map??? I gotta take care of him too I guess?

Some thoughts:

1. Coins become unmanageable at some point.
As cluttered and scattered as a coin purse can be (which works for the vibe of the game!), whether as a base feature or something to "Earn/Unlock" in a play-through via some side quest or food trade, some Feature that sorts the Coins via Value into their own piles would work fantastic here. Maybe something like Coin Stacks that tower up to 5-10 as you get that amount of that value coin, and a total amount tracker over/under that stack of X once you go beyond the visual max for the tower. (For the 5 and 50 coins, the stack's visuals could be tied with a shoestring like a dystopian necklace.)
Since the whole manual coin insertion's the star of the show, I wouldn't dare ask to be allowed to manually type a value, merely streamlining the coin piles to help with value selection.

2. On the note of Currency management... Currency Exchange? It'd be nice to be able to ditch all of the 1's and 5's for a single 100.

3. The Inventory can be improved. For the current system, I love that food now stacks for multiples. I have two issues.
-I can't tap/click an item I see, it has to be DIRECT CENTRE of the inventory to THEN highlight, and THEN interact with. Making the centre item always highlighted would help there.
-Getting to the other items is gonna take some time, since you gotta tap the arrow and wait for the inventory to slide. If the player was allowed to either constantly tap that Arrow Up/Down to speed through their inventory, or even making the items that aren't the centre tappable to highlight and auto-move to centre, that would be a major improvement.

4. Inventory sorting might be rough with the current system. Being able to put stuff we don't want at the bottom or even completely new items for the run getting put at the top with an Unread/Untouched notification tag might work for now? Ideally, some kind of grid with multiple pages would be nice. The game's gonna have alot of items, and in a game with alot of items, item management's a big thing, and a 1 x 5 strip is going to be rough to deal with... Again, for now? Works great since the item pool isn't that big, you at least HAVE an inventory system, that's impressive. 

I dunno how a game about begging in the streets and mutating from inter-dimensional food has me this engaged enough to draw up an image of my idea, but... this game has alot of effort and passion and I'm very excited to see more!

I figured out it gives you a code after receiving the item so put in the number amount show on the display when it gives it. usually it would be a normal number amount.

Btw for anyone reading this (me late) heres a tip for all transformation paths

Perfect line (celestial, cosmic tree)

Only eat apple seeds. First try to eat a good food like lemon clam to give you more hunger to start, then insert ONLY ¥50 yen for 50 apple seeds, this worked for me. 5 stages

Unhealthy line (gluttonous sugar addict blob)

Only drink sodas, but you can also eat better foods like chocolate food. For sodas, only insert ¥150 which will always guarantee a cola, pepsi or ghostbusters soda. 5 stages

Anomalous line (Rainbow alien)

Only eat foods such as fluffy alien box, lemon clams, rainbow apples, that fetus in a bottle, bottles eyes, sewage and i cant name more. Inserting ¥100 will have a 11% chance to give you an anomalous item.  Inserting ¥500 yen has a %50 chance to give you an Anomalous item.

Parasite line (Queen of insects)

Eat foods such as bottled worms, cicadas, pile o slugs, roaches (ROASTED ROACHES ON A STICK DO NOT COUNT), and more. Insert ¥100 for the best chances but im not sure.

Liquid line (Hollow bride)

Unobtainable, no liquids will do anything, sodas will lead you to the unhealthy route, sewage water will lead you to the Anomalous route, antarctic water and figi i dont know

This demo has great art. However, the art aside, everything else is bad and needs to be improved. Now, I realize that it's an unfinished demo, so some of my points can be explained by that, but I still thought I should mentioned them just in case:

• It's annoying that you must click through the dialog before you can interact with anything. In the tutorial it says: "Try pressing this coin slot", but not matter where and how many times you press it - it does not work. Turns out you have to click on the dialog box saying these instructions before you can press it. I spent solid minute pressing the coin slot and just the vending machine in general in every possible place! So within 30 seconds of playing the game, a player is already stuck and thinks the game has bugged. I actually closed the game because of this issue, as I couldn't figure it out. This is not good user experience. I did reopen it later, thinking that restarting it would fix this, and eventually figured out that you had to dismiss the instructions first.
• The coin sorting algorithm is way too inefficient. When you have 5,000-10,000 yen, the game freezes for over 5 seconds when you click on the vending machine's coin slot. At least it does on the browser version of the game (Google Chrome, Ryzen 9 5950X, RTX 3070 Ti, 32GB RAM).
  • Also, if you manage to click it multiple times in a row because of this freeze, the coins will get sorted multiple times, prolonging the game freeze.
  • It's also a bit annoying how higher value coins cover up lower value coins that you might want to use, forcing you to move 10-20 coins out of the way before you can access the lower value ones, wasting Food and Water because the clock is still ticking. Kinda wish I could auto-sort them in stacks or something, so that I had easier time accessing whatever denomination I want.
• The coin collecting section is too boring (uneventful) and takes way too much time. I found myself watching YouTube while the game was playing in the background with sound disabled.
• The dialogue in the coin collection section does not change based on your appearance.
• There is no ending of any sort, at least as far as I have played. I got my girl to look like [spoiler]some sort of celestial white mask tree[/spoiler], but no matter how much I fed her after that, the game didn't seem to progress anywhere. It seems like I have reached the end of progression, but the game didn't notify me of this so I wasted a lot of time trying to progress further.
• There is really no point to the game as it is right now. The game loop is exactly the same no mater if you just started or played for many hours, all that changes is the girl's image. The world does not react to her changing, no new actions become available, no new scenes, nothing. There is no incentive to progress in the game, as progressing in the game doesn't do anything, aside from perhaps unlocking the Gallery.
• It's not very clear that the hamburger icon acts like a pause, so it would be made clearer. Perhaps add "PAUSED" in the middle of the screen while in the hamburger menu? Or change the icon from hamburger to a pause, and make menu items appear: "Back to title screen, Quit, etc."

It's a cool game but it's gets boring in time and like nothing affects on a character, she just exists there and maybe eats something gross but never been even thin

We need ways to increase the yield of yen....or at least give more ways to earn hunger or thirst fillage

When You're playing an SCP game and you have to drink an unborn fetus, you know you've got a banger. 

Really fun, would play for hours.

I love this game, but it crashes non stop and gets rid of all my progress, all my invigorating, my money, everything

how do i use teh infinite money glitch

(Had to update this after 4 hours after posting this, so it's a different comment now and my honest opinion on the game, mobile version.)

So I know I said before this game is similar to Anomalous Coffee Machine (only Coffee and adult themed in that one then food and drinks and luckly no adult stuff in this one.) because of SCP-261 (I know the Coffee Machine is SCP-294 and not SCP-261) but after playing more of this game, I prefer to play this one as I do like the part where you have put the coins in the machine yourself by dragging it, also you have to keep the hunger and thirst meter up, well except if you want to go the starved ending, as it's more interesting and I do like the yen money as I may not be from Japan I just find their money fascinated but back to the topic of the game the art looks so good too even the bad food are detailed but just want to say this again, keep up the good work on this game and I hope to see more of this game and the updates. 😊

Oh tiny question will there ever be a version of this game where you play as a guy?

I finally released my 100% video on this game! If you guys want to see all the transformations, all items, all dialogue and more, check it out here!

The game is very good, but needs some QOL updates.
first: skip dialogue when collecting from the machine. its extremely tedious. instead give items in the inventory a description.
second, feeding coins to the machine is also highly tedious, maybe let us pick up a selected value of 1 yen coins, like 5 or 10 at a time.

It took too long for anything to happen

I do hope there will be good endings where she becomes healthy and beautiful, she was already homeless and desperate enough to collect coins from corpses. Cut the girl a break 

There was an update 14h ago but there was no log for it, so what actually was changed? Also the Steam page doesnt link to the game for me dev.

Is it glitching or is it just really slow for things to start happening?

500 yen coin is such a treasure yet so inconvenient... (5 items for 1)

does the lady you play as have a canon name?

This was such a bizarre, beautiful, and quietly disturbing experience — I absolutely loved it. 

We featured your game in a recent YouTube video where we played some of the creepiest and most surreal games on Itch.io, and this one really stood out.

не играйте в браузере эта хуета по кд отказывается принимать нажим кнопок. а ещё делать чтоб во время загрузки монет в автомат голод и жажда уменьшались это отвратительная идея. без негатива, просто идея реально хуета.