A very polished, moody package with strong visual & audio direction. I especially like how the sprites emphasize the lighting – it's a good argument as any for how much these kinds of small touches count. The story is not bad, either, building up to an enjoyable setpiece and coming with a central moral dilemma gnarly enough to make an impact. I guess my biggest doubt about how the game fares on the whole is this: although I do respect the ambition, I feel like the game maybe aims a bit too high for its short length.
There's an established template for this kind of thing, and we're sort of speedrunning through it. So much has already happened by the time the plot starts that the sense of escalation is weak, the beginning is lacking in nice little character moments, and the mysterious ice thing doesn't really ever rise beyond a plot device; as a result, we miss out on many of the typical delights of the genre. To reiterate, I like how nasty and gruesome the endings get even while focusing on personal stakes, but the problems in them feel more like unfortunate random events than character-based conflicts. And while the central ice mystery not getting much in terms of an explanation or a payoff hurts a little, it also remaining pretty vaguely sketched thematically (the final ending's suggestion that it may have generated the multiple timelines only made it feel less clear to me) hurts more.
And at the same time, there's some stuff that ultimately feels a little extraneous. Character-wise, Achre doesn't leave much of an impression and feels so inessential for the logistics of the climax that I wonder if the story could have compressed the cast to just three guys. There's a lot of lovely complexity and attention to detail with how the vessel is depicted, and as important as that is for the compelling atmosphere the game manages to generate, I wonder if there's stuff that could have been cut. Similarly, the first two endings work well together to make a point, but then the third one sort of makes a different one and even adds a couple of new elements; in the limited scope of a game jam VN, I can see an argument for a simpler, more focused structure.
That's about it, really – on the whole, I did have a good time with the VN, but I ultimately feel like it maybe didn't hit me as hard as it could have. Smaller nitpicks would include some readability stuff. The blue text is a bit hard to read (and a puzzling element in general; I was wondering if it related to the ice somehow), and the computer font might be just a little too much for the longer segments.