Very impressive work all around. The prose, art, music, etc. are all solid. Considering most FVNs are based on the author’s personal experience (write what you know), this impresses for being one of the few examples that comes to my mind of an FVN that seems to have been extensively researched.
Not only does the mirror animation look good, but it’s probably one of the most smoothlessly integrated animations in a Renpy game I’ve seen. I will say though, the animations and the accompanying POV switches are in a few occasions abused. I think a game like this works better if the point of view switches at meaningful times, especially considering how fond the game is of switching it in the middle of a scene and considering how long the accompanying animation is. There is at least one notable example of this being done in a pretty clunky way, towards the end of the story: we switch POV to the prince (with the animation), then just a couple of lines later we switch back to Darin (without animation) just so we can see the prince’s expression, only for then switch back to the prince again (with the animation).
Both the subject matter (transgenerational gay solidarity, yay!) and the story is compelling, although the prince’s backstory especially fell just a little bit flat for me, it felt more like a summary and less like a flashback, which is a bit disappointing considering it’s half-treated as a flashback (we get some imagery and dialogue from the past)! But that’s a nitpick, the core of the story being the two mains conversing with each other works.
I don’t know if this was done intentionally, but I like that by the end not only does Darin fail to convince the prince of his point of view, but he does not share what feels like the most crucial part of his backstory (the final conversation with his wife only we as the audience get to see). I think this leaves us with a delicious ambiguity: did Darin fail because history cannot be changed (either literally or metaphorically, i.e. the prince is the victim of his cultural environment)… or did he fail because Darin failed once again to open up completely and reveal what he is most ashamed of? Good stuff.
One final nitpick I want to mention regards the game’s glossary feature. I have been making fun of this game during streams because it feels the need to explain to us even concepts like the countries of Denmark and Iran. In general, I’m not the biggest fan of glossaries in games, I think the reader should either be exposed to the information they need to understand the story naturally in the text or left to do their own research. But I can respect the decision. What’s a bit perplexing though is that the final scene mostly relies on the reader knowing how Islamic divorce works. It’s strange for the game to be holding the reader’s hand so tightly that it needs to explain to them what “Denmark” is, but then for such a crucial beat of the story the reader is left to fend for themself.