This game is technically, visually and musically excellent. The resources used — Elegant GUI, the Inline Tooltips, the Shaders, etc — are all not haphazardly thrown together but thoughtfully and elegantly deployed with an obvious measure of confidence and competence. The background images are kind of generic for the medium, but have been sufficiently stylized to match the intended character of the VN.
(I also immensely appreciate all the QoL, the 'this action will have consequences'-style the pop-up notifications, cluing the player into the anger–reason axis that affects the ending. This was made with a lot of consideration for UX and that means a lot. I don't like having to dig into a VN's scripts to figure out what I should be doing.)
The soundtrack is a banger, becoming intense when it needs to be, but most of the time it needs to be elegiac, because this is an extremely elegiac game. With how polished these tracks are, I honestly can't believe these were all finished up in a month! I thought before double-checking that these songs were another free resource. The murder scene in particular has a great beat. The scripting is also technically proficient, making the most out of a little to keep the screen busy and maintain appropriate emotional timbre.
The script is also really well-polished — almost immaculately edited, which is rarer for a VN than it should be, and I can tell it was written by someone who loves language. As for the writing itself, this is directed at the devs and not other prospective players so I'll put this behind spoilers:
The central conceit of this story rules. Haunting your murderer is a fun idea! A cute murder mystery/love story between the real Ethan and the MC as ghosts is a really cute idea, and I love the notion that, by getting to ask out the MC in the Justice ending, Ethan might cross over? Whereas the MC in the Revenge ending will always walk the earth, tethered by her now-unresolvable regrets (I'm just gonna use female pronouns here because I was a female playing the game). And the twist was great! I understood at the end why Jude and Ethan's designs closely resembled each other, which had been shaping up to be a criticism.
Where I ended up feeling unfulfilled a little was feeling the narrative led me down a garden path with Jude. Now: I can understand that Jude coveted Ethan's life and perception of academic excellence and murdered him for it, and then murdered the MC because she got too close to evidence of Jude's crimes. But there's some ostensible red herrings with Ethan having "discovered more about Ashenville than was taught in school" that don't seem to go anywhere, and other school IDs besides his own and Ethan's that Jude is noted to have stashed away in the morgue. Other victims?
It feels to me almost like more world-building had been composed for the narrative than the narrative actually needed, and so most of it was cut, but there's certain vestiges retained in the story? But altogether it just feels like Jude's final motivations are much too petty for how he was characterized throughout, and how guilt-ridden and emotionally traumatized he seems to be over the actions he committed.
(For context: I had theorized while playing that Jude was being menaced by some demonic entity, and had been forced to kill people as blood sacrifices to said entity, similar to something in the old indie comic Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, and that he was seeing that demon-thing behind the MC and Ethan.)
I also just, like... don't know why Jude can see ghosts at all. Shouldn't he, like... not be able to do that? It's something that's not really explored by the narrative and maybe "less is more" is the right authorial attitude here but I would have liked to know more about this. Does murdering someone in this universe just make you perpetually able to see their ghosts? Is Jude some kind of medium, and is this why he's crazy? There's a lot here, and I would have liked seeing it addressed.
Some other quibbles:
• The sting that plays in the title screen is very nice, but I wish there was a longer, looping track, because reading the "About" page in silence is weird.
• I would have liked a Sound Test to sample all the tracks without having to dig through the game's directory, because these songs really are that good.
• The forest path is intuitive enough once you try all options, but left me feeling like I should have been able to know the correct route before getting there.
Anyway! It's a great time and you all should be proud. Thank you for making this!