I've had several priveledges in experiencing this game, from watching its graphics and structure develop from as early as August 2023 to playing it on its launch at the Spooktober Game Jam over the fall. No Time For Mercy exists as the actualization of elements that many creative minds can only ramble and idealize over. The characters are molded to imperfect, inconcise people that rove through the Huang convenience store in the courses of their own busy lives, each carrying their own expertises, their temperaments, their ails, and a certain, unspoken weight that seems to hang onto all of Bridge Creek's residents in a variety of shapes as they try to get through.
In the same way, the protagonist Vic's identity as a queer Chinese-American girl exists out of the foreground of the increasingly unnerving, scary situation on Vic's plate at the moment, and yet are indisputably present factors to her life- her ever-critical chinese mother, the pork-filled buns the store sells; Vic being drawn in by the charm of the mysterious young woman who comes in during the story, and mentions of her co-ed crushes back in school-- all fill a long-lived hunger for stories where being queer and asian exist as "normative" identities do, not necessarily needing to be in the limelight, yet irreplacably there.
The game is not a masterpiece, let me be clear- it was tricky to get a feel of how the choices led to story moments or the endings without the guide; the UI is rough, and the art and writing, though well-done, are absolutely a work of what is Trinket's early career as a game developer. And in another sense, that's exciting!- with her determination, the growth of all this dev's skills and ideas will only compound into projects with greater ambitions and greater executions as time goes on. I look forward to every project that turns out from the steps of that climb- (go get em trink >:) )