Finished playing this game and wanted to collect my thoughts. ...are there more endings than just one? Did I mess up somewhere? Ah, it wasn't signalled properly, and despite how much I adore this VN, the sordid lack of the basic VN functionality of the skip button led me to do another run where I got the `the end...?` screen again.
I do not want to state this to hurt or to beat down on you. Please, please, please. If you're going with Unity, please make sure the things you're doing with it give you more power and convenience than a dedicated, easy option to build VNs like Ren'py or Godot's Dialogic. I sorely missed save/loads and the skip button. These options even allow you to export to web faster than Unity takes to build.
Feel free to correct me if there is indeed a ctrl->skip or a save/load feature. I'm kinda dumb sometimes.
Now the dialogue. The actual way the dialogue is written is fantastic and has absolutely zero complaints from my side. You have managed to effortlessly jump high and over the awkward "I'm writing a serious VN but I have tone issues" dialogue I see very frequently in indie VNs. Great job for that!^^
About the delivery. I really, really understand how hard it is to deliver an exposition and not make it an infodump, and I am glad that the VN tries to take that problem seriously and doesn't infodump, the exposition is bound seamlessly to the introduction, albeit that doesn't mean it's completely flawless. Sometimes I was left wondering what the significance of a few terms even was (which I'm guessing was left out to prevent infodumping) but by reading more I discovered those anyway, so that's fine, and I'm not expecting you to write a new Shiravune title in the span of 4.5 days, ah-hah...
About the story itself. I would call it a lot better than I expected. This was clearly a passion project and made for fun! I'm so happy to see that. I really, really like the idea of the protagonist fighting to free themselves from the agony of a groundhog day loop. There were a few smoking hot Chekhov's guns that never went off (the poisons and the significance of Ilio as a character) ((might just be me?? I could not see more than one ending, is this a skill issue on my end?) and I was a bit disappointed by the underuse of Caze as a character... haah. I really liked the "he's doing everything according to the book!! why can't we beat him?!" gimmick he was supposed to have. Once again, 4.5 days, atrocious time limit, I get it, don't worry.
The art was awesome! How did you get unironic professional grade illustrators to work with you?! That's so cool!! I really liked Drax's and Akira's designs!! I want to be able to draw something that great!! I kneel!
Either way, those are my unorganised thoughts put on screen. I really adored this VN, and I don't mean to hurt you by saying what I didn't like. Trust me when I say I had fun with this VN. Thanks a lot for this game!!
Definitely my favourite VN this jam though. Keep it up, eh?