Feel like I see you in every comment section. Your turn, pal.
This was solid. Certainly more ambitious in structure than some of the other projects, which I think helped this project but also left some bumps in the road.
Major spoilers from here on out.
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Implementation of Theme:
As I read it, the theme is implemented as kind of a twist here, with Tor being the light for Ian rather the other way around, which is a fun misdirect. I think it may lose a bit of traction at the end though with the message being that Ian should let Tor go, but I think my issues with that are better saved for the story section.
Story:
Full props for attempting something with a higher degree of difficulty in terms of storytelling - games that artificially require multiple playthroughs to get the real ending (i.e., you need to finish the game with a bad ending to unlock the good ending as opposed to trial and error where you could have gotten the good ending the first time) usually annoy me, but I think this was pulled off well enough. I like the references in the early game to later developments that give the reader things to notice, but I did feel that the "friend" and "love" routes still felt kinda samey with the exception of a few scenes. (I get that this was probably kind of the point, but from a "gameplay" perspective it would have been nice to have more differences so I didn't feel like I could just skip through most of it). I also like the way you teased the way to get to the second route without fully giving it away, even if I was just a little upset that Ian's lover couldn't canonically be named Admiral Pussypounder :(
Ultimately I think my main issues with the story are that you bit off a little more than you could chew in the confines of the jam. The long bits of narration between the town and the beach are evidence of this - everything up to that point is so granular that it feels jarring and abrupt to basically fast forward the rest of the story to the climax. I also struggled to put all the flashbacks together into a coherent narrative, and I'm not sure if everything was an actual memory or if some were just Ian's and/or Tor's desires. Like, Tor's wish is to go to the beach, so does that mean it wasn't fulfilled in real life, even though the "love" epilogue shows them about to leave? Like, it looks like they got blown up at work so presumably nothing happened on the way. Or was that just the memory that was in Tor's and/or Ian's mind before they got zapped?
Also not entirely sure what to make of the ending. I got that the story was Ian's purgatory waaaayyyy early on, but was the implication that he had actually dragged Tor's soul into it somehow? Cus that is pretty messed up, and really muddies the theme for me.
Presentation:
No major issues here. I thought the sprites and CGs were totally fine, especially on short notice, and the custom UI was a nice touch. I do wish some of the backgrounds came through a bit more clearly though. There were parts where we were supposedly in a tunnel that didn't look much different from the fields.
Also, I get the whole "there's nothing left to see here, the story's over thing", but it would still be nice to have a "start over" button or something from a gameplay and review perspective so I didn't have to delete save data or look in the script file to go back and reread some lines.
Creativity:
I can't fault the effort, really. This was a fun idea for a more complex narrative, and even if it didn't land every shot smoothly, I still felt like this was heartfelt and entertaining.
I give this 806,503 plus 3 and counting cycles out of 4455 bamboo tubes of fur care products.