Even though it’s still not finished, Terminated manages to hook you up and convince you it has a point to make. Even though the story takes place in a surreal setting where anything can happen, plenty of seeds are planted throughout to hint at the concepts the story is exploring. While I had plenty of fun sharing my theories with other people during our book club, I will wait for the final release to add them to my review.

The presentation is just as good. The custom sprites and BG are brought to life through clever layering and animations. The stock pictures of liminal spaces are just as masterfully used. In particular, I like how the mirror effect reinforces the imagery of cells reproducing by splitting up. But the sound design is probably the part that impresses me the most, with the VN mostly forgoing music in favor of ambience tracks and noises which sells the atmosphere perfectly.

My main gripe with Terminated is that I want a game that uses the same insanely well crafted narrative and wonderful imagery, but it’s about a young witch trying to solve the disappearance of her neighbor’s cat in a small village in the Alps. Unfortunately, it was probably too difficult to accomodate such a story within the limits of the May Wolf game jam rules.

Also, while the writing style is mostly great and fits the story quite well, I do think there are points where simpler shorter sentences would have been more appropriate. Some of the sentences were quite dizzying to read, especially the ones describing the “action” bits. But as a fellow non-native English speakers, I know too well it isn’t easy to shake off the tendency of Euro-English for complex sentence structures.