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Psycho Spiral Beast's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Creativity | #33 | 2.845 | 2.935 |
Presentation | #34 | 2.470 | 2.548 |
Implementation of Theme | #34 | 1.938 | 2.000 |
Story | #38 | 2.095 | 2.161 |
Ranked from 31 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Name of Wolf/Wolves
Kaindep
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Comments
Finally, a human-isekai'ed-to-furry-world, but the MC is the evil. It's a refreshing premise and the audio direction helps to build the feel. Unfortunately, though, the pacing is off. It felt like I was presented with plot point after plot point without the time to get immersed in the story. I couldn't connect to any character on an emotional level.
The potential of the story is there. I think if the writing is further refined, it'll make a much more interesting story.
I liked the flute music, and how the chants were mixed in later on in the story. I also like the concept; a human descending into madness, and how one would react to stumbling across a world of beast men.
This is the second to last vn I've read for the jam. At this point it may just be vn fatigue setting in, but the story was so short it was hard for me to connect with it before it was over. I read it through twice to make sure I wasn't missing something. Also immersion breaking was the background photo featuring humans in a location where we just learned the inhabitors were unfamiliar with humans, unless this was intended to indicate to the reader the beast men were also a hallucination of the mc.
There were some really interesting ideas. Furries would be terrifying in the real world for sure. But I couldn't quite connect to the story as we don't know these characters.
Still, as a proof of concept, it does its job
Psycho Spiral Beast: incredibly weird and kind of rough all around. Writing-wise, the tense is inconsistent, typos are plentiful, and many sentences flow strangely. The medium isn't used perfectly, either – dialogue is sometimes jankily presented through the narration, and a couple of lines are too long for the Ren'py default text box design.
Surface-level issues aside, the story is just kind of confusing and doesn't feel like it coheres into any kind of clear point or emotion. If "What is real and what isn't?" is supposed to be understood as the central question, I have no clue about the answer. Mostly, I guess, it feels like the plot opens in the middle without ever circling back into whatever inciting incident started it all and ends without a clear conclusion.
I'm kind of doubting myself as a reader here, honestly – did not get it. (No hint of the jam theme either, as far as I can tell.) Points for sound design, though.
12th...Vn....I...will...read...and...rate...here...we...go...*collapses from exhaustion * (seriously, I gotta fix my sleep schedule to get through this, I must read them all!)
Edit 1: For some reason, I can't open the Windows version. I click on it but no windows pops up. Maybe it's a problem of my device? Therefore, I will try opening it later. In the meanwhile I will read some other entry.
Edit 2: I have just finished playing this game and I think, wow, more people should play this game! As other comments remarked, this is a subversion of your average isekai furry visual novel trope, which I believe can justify a rate of five stars in creativity. Instead of what often happens in iskeai fvn's, the mc acts the way anyone would do if they were suddenly transported to a different world with humanoid-animal people (and, to be honest, it makes sense. I would be quite terrified if I had a beastman in front of me, at least at first).
Another point I concur with other comments about is the SFX and audio design, which was evidently diegetically-picked. The result is a game that pays plenty of attention to ambience an atmosphere. You could feel as if you were in the mc's shoes, truly!
There are very few negative points I can point out. One of them is presentation. The sprites often didn't look properly positioned in the backgrounds (an example I can bring up is the fire scene. The fire is being looked to closely, but suddenly the dragon's full body sprite appears in front of it, making them look as if they were extremely tiny). Art can do with a bit more polishing, too (props for trying regardless, there were many OC CG's). Also, as other comments have pointed out, what's going on is explained almost entirely by the end of the story. The explanation could have been betterly distributed thorough the story, I think.
That's what I think about this vn. Thanks for the experience!
Minor spoilers to follow
I think the concept is really interesting (destroy the Beastmen! attack them! feast upon their flesh!), but the execution is way too rough and rushed to really be enjoyable. Other than the interesting concept (which isn't really developed, because it's like the last two lines) nothing leaves much of an impression. The writing is rough and doesn't really gives itself time to establish an atmosphere, and the imagery is bizarre not always in a good way: the shift from demonic imagery to colorful background with humans in it is jarring and the sprites are very weirdly positioned.
I will say that one aspect I did enjoy was the audio design. The flute music, repeated in two different versions, were very effective and there is some nice sound effects to punctuate the nightmarish scenes.
Spoilers follow probably:
Theme: Franky, I'm not sure, but I felt like I felt the echo of it in the brief window of the work.
Story: Taking an isekai more literally. I appreciate it . I think you did some interesting things, and I liked a good chunk of your prose, but I don't think we needed the beastman lore info dumps. That felt against the ethos of the work. I feel like the protagonist would tune it out even if it was being told to him, because it's not real.
I feel like it doesn't quite satisfyingly lead up to the conclusion, but I do like teh attempt.
Presentation: This is the one work where I felt that the silence was diegetically chosen, outside of the sfx, and I appreciated that choice. I also liked your custom art.
Creativity: I appreciated your take on the isekai narrative, and thought it felt comparatively fresh, albeit I don't know how I felt about the hallucinations being valid/the root cause. I enjoyed that satire of the "culturally unaware" greeting.
Overall thoughts: Interesting approach, that I think needed a little more time in-universe to reach teh payoff it wanted to approach, probably with nodding to the genre pre-requisites with some time prior to the isekai, and more time in the isekai (or at least, swap the info dump for something else).
terse, short attempt. Well done.
You know, for how often the isekai trope is used in the FVN space, I never really considered how terrifying it would be to suddenly see a giant smiling dogman sauntering toward me. Focusing on this aspect made the trope feel fresh and gave it a new dimension.
There are some snags with formatting here and there, and it is overall not as polished as I would have liked, but it is a delightfully trippy read.