Ooof, man, what a gut punch. A good gut punch! But a gut punch.
Spoilers ahead for anyone who has not completed the game.
Implementation of Theme:
There's a few different ways to take it, I think. You have Rover being a figurative "light" that inspires both Stoffel and the passengers on his rocket in their own respective ways, and then that morphs into a literal light in the darkness once the rocket takes off. Any or all of those interpretations work for me.
Story:
This one walks a really fine line between the absurd and the grounded, with the absurd both coming in the form of some of the over-the-top characterizations (Ozzy was a bit too much of the overly serious store manager type for me though) and the general concept of a university student building a real, functioning spaceship out of a school bus and junkyard parts like he's Jimmy Neutron or something.
All of this serves as a very nice foil for the dynamic between Stoffel and Rover, which feels much more "real". Some of the interactions are still exaggerated, but I think the ending especially hit home because of how grounded that felt. Someone who cares deeply about someone else doing something kind of shitty because they don't want to face the hardship of never seeing them again feels very realistic.
Two issues I have with the writing here are:
1) I never really bought Stoffel's reason for staying behind. I wonder if having a more concrete extrinsic reason why he couldn't go with Rover, like a family he needed to support or something, would have been more effective in showing that he wanted to leave but there was nothing he could do.
2) There were a few lines that felt just a bit too on-the-nose and kinda took me out of the narrative. For example, "Well we madly care for each other, but we've got two conflicting destinies." This feels more like telling-not-showing than natural conversation to me and I don't think you really need this line because literally every other part of the VN already hammers this point home.
Presentation:
Not a lot of complaints for me here. Sprites are very homemade, but I think they're effective at conveying the characters' emotions, especially on the jam time crunch. The visual of Sam magically scooting away on her ladder is priceless.
Music was a bit rougher though. I'm not sure what was going on with that one track with the really loud recorder (?) but I had to turn the volume way down because I really couldn't stand it. Maybe it was because of how much I had lowered the volume, but I didn't notice any issues after that though.
Creativity:
Okay, so while this isn't technically the only jam submission that involves a time-limited gay romance that tries to be somewhat positive about an apocalyptic scenario, I still give this one plenty of points for creativity, especially in both the balance of tone and the very... scientific? approach to the setting. I thought the injection of political commentary into the narrative wasn't overly burdensome or intrusive either, and it's easy to fall into that trap.
I kinda low-key expected Rover's ship to blow up after launch the whole way through, but I'm glad you left it open-ended. This was a really good submission!