Let me preface this by saying that I think everyone involved made an amazing work. Not only did everyone put their whole pussies into this, I think Cygnus’s dance might be, individually, the most powerful scene in the whole jam. Sometimes with this kind of collaborations it is natural to think “this is being carried by the art” or “this is being carried by the writing” or similar, but in that scene everything coalesce superbly and it left a very strong impression on me. The writing! The art! The music! (I guess Mystic forgot to add a transition there, but they have suffered enough.)
However, I do think that this VN suffers a little bit from the whole being less the sum of its parts. I must admit I’m someone who tends to judge VNs very much holistically, so this affects my rating a little bit, but I would definitely hope to see these concerns addressed in the future because the ingredients all there!
I think this VN has a big hurdle to overcome in that it chose a very fractured structured composed of many disconnected and chronologically scattered scenes, that furthermore tend to be very short. While it’s a format that allows the game to give us a lot of information, it’s not a format that facilitates us getting emotionally involved in the story, because we’re never allowed to dwell on anything or to witness the characters natrually go from one state of mind to another. (Or, better, it happens way more infrequently than I would have liked.)
On a related note, this is just my opinion and writing advice, but I feel like the story did not do itself any favors by choosing to employ timeskips even before the fantastic memory machine is introduced! Such a device is a very useful tool so as to allow the story to abandon the limits of a specific contained timeframe, but the story already had no such limits from the very beginning! A structure à la “A Christmas Carol”, where the “framing device” is very grounded and contained (just 1-2 days) and then we use some kind of magic device to explore the past would have been more effective imho.
Besides this, purkka summarized what I feel like is my main issue with the story incredibly well: “the journey to Cygnus's memories being nonlinear but not really compensating with any other way to make it feel like we're making constant progress.” We’re shown a lot of vignettes, but their significance to Erin’s growth or them processing their grief is not always very apparent. This is also where my criticism of “Erin/Cygnus have no chemistry” or “Cygnus/Kosta have better chemistry” comes in. I’m not saying the characters are at fault, if anything it looks to me like a lot of love and thought was clearly put into their personalities and backgrounds. But how the narrative chooses to spend its limited resources is not always very efficient. We spend too much time establishing Cygnus and Kosta’s relationship (and their scenes are so effective at doing so to boot!), and that comes at the expense of what should be the focus of the story, which is Erin and Cygnus’s relationship. Kosta is a wonderful character, but I think the story should have just featured him in scenes that matter narratively while leaving his backstory implied. Instead, it is Erin to get that kind of treatment: we mostly focus on them on the present and leave the foundations of them and Cygnus’s relationship for the reader to infer!
Like in most of my reviews, I realize I tend to focus a lot more on the aspects I didn’t quite enjoy or that could be improved, so I just want to reiterate my overall impression is still very positive and everyone involved is rightfully very proud of what they did!