Remember that really grim trend from around a decade ago on Tumblr where someone tied balloons that say “get well soon” on dead deer by the road? Asking for no particular reason.
After reading the devlog for this VN, I felt a lot better. I must admit reading Gravekeeper had me exhausted by the end cause of the length, and I kept wondering “why are we here? Just to suffer?”. I was wondering what is the point of this long VN and what is it trying to tell me. But I think I‘m getting ahead of myself a bit.
First, I find the premise very interesting and promising for further development. Seeing the practical, moral and existential questions a society has to tackle in a world where undeath is a fact of (un)life is very interesting. One of my biggest gripes is that the narrative didn't allocate a lot of attention to exploring those questions. We get something, but most of the time is spent on what is my main issue…
I felt like the beginning and closing thoughts the story had were the best, and everything between felt like filler. The story is filled with pretty creative monsters of the week that all have their own unique mechanics and gimmicks, and we do get Myles having to adapt and overcome them in different ways… However it felt to me like too much time and wordcount was given to Myles explaining his tactics in details, and a lot of the interesting questions regarding the people, their relationships and society are pushed aside.
I think my issue is the fact that while Myles‘s predicament itself is interesting, he isn't a particularly interesting protagonist, since he doesn't have much interesting going on. He‘s just on that sigma grindset, spending his (un)life from one assignment to the other. The one part I found more engaging was the ending, where he finally gets challenged about that, but that was literally a few lines before we wrapped up.
Another big misstep that I think could have been avoided is that Myles is alone for most of the VN. There is a reason why we have duo detectives or cops in these types of stories. He had nobody to have any type of dynamic with, there was no interesting back and forth, banter, or just clashes of different worldviews. That does bring me to the brief flashes of what we could have had...
The brief moments where we have mission control in the form of the operator is a glimpse into another more dynamic version of this story. Alternatively, Billy also brought exactly what I think this story needed to the table. It‘s a shame we have him for so short! He felt like the true heart of the game, an actual protagonist who engages with these interesting dilemmas the story and world pose. His discomfort with his government‘s and society‘s callousness towards wraiths, and ultimately his sympathetic nature leading to a big ethical dilemma regarding ghost grandma… That‘s the good stuff I was craving the entire time.
I also don‘t have anywhere to put this neatly, but I must mention the plotline regarding Grand SOMEWHERE. It was resolved in such an anticlimactic way, that I was in disbelief. I must wonder if this was a problem with editing, the jam time constraints or what went wrong here.
While I do always enjoy heroes defying the "if you kill him, you‘ll be just as bad as him!" trope, I was flabbergasted that we had so much time devoted to Myles getting into both an ethical and criminal pickle, spending so much time trying to work around it, ultimately failing, scrambling on how he‘ll do damage control and then… The story just unceremoniously drops the whole thing and it gets resolved in a throwaway line after a time skip… I was just waiting for this to come back and bite Myles in the ass, but then the story ended and I had to make peace with the fact that it‘s just a loose plot thread that went nowhere.
Lastly, I have to compliment the visuals. I always like seeing jam devs getting creative and going wild with editing the sprites provided by the organisers. The little detail like wounds carefully layered under clothes, and seeing them actually heal and become scars after a while was a very nice touch.
Ultimately, the last piece of my reading of this VN is in the post mortem dev diary. Seeing that the author used this jam to get back into the creative groove made me happy. Also props to a dev that actually went back after the update embargo was lifted in January and actually updating and finishing the VN, that's always commendable and sadly rare with jam games. I hope my criticisms are helpful and I think that despite any issues I had, this project is a big success since it accomplished what the author set out to do. I wish the best of luck to the dev back in the AO3 mines!