kind of had an inkling of what was going down fairly early on but, like jonas, i wanted to believe i was mistaken haha
i really like your writing, it's so evocative... there's a really nice blend of pretty dream-like prose, more light-hearted comedic moments, and some more vulgar moments which all manage to feel cohesive. the large amount of literary references is fun too, it might be because i just finished reading this but it reminded me just a little of the drowning girl by caitlin kiernan maybe crossed over with some ryu murakami for the more violent and depraved moments
i happen to like pretty language and depravity so it's always fun to see them combined like this, especially in a story which treats its dark subject matter with so much tact. i feel like there's a lot of depth here, which is nice since i am sick and tired of vns and anime-adjacent media utilising the very uncomfortable trope of [redacted] and then refusing to address any of the damage it can cause (or even like as a baseline admitting it's not socially acceptable lol) and treating it as idk a fun cutesy romp. like whhhhy even utilise such a relationship in a fictional story if you don't want to explore it with any degree of nuance for like 2 seconds, i wish more stories would treat these sorts of topics with a degree of seriousness.
uhh i think some of the VERY LOUD sound effects are overkill and i'm not a fan of jumpscares in general but i still liked this a lot. the writing is impeccable, i even enjoyed all the french extracts of lazare's novel though i speak not a lick of french since it gives the story a more authentic 20th century~ish vibe. i know a lot of classical authors stuck long passages of latin or french or german in their stories without providing a translation, it felt quite true to that haha
it was a really interesting vn, i think the writing especially is captivating... thank you for creating it!
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Hi, thanks for the detailed feedback!
Thank you so much for the writing! I did try to make it quite fancier for... vibes, that was sincerely what led me the most this game haha, beyond any structural/rational thought! So most of the time, I was like "Is this necessary? No. Overpunctuated? Certainly. But do I vibe with the sentence.." and that's all that mattered to me in the end! And I've never read or heard of The Drowning Girl, I take note! For Murakami, he's been on my list of authors to discover haha, I gotta go through the books I currently have unread on my shelves and then start thinking of the first book I'd read from him (but inspirations for the depravity are Mishima's work, obviously, but also Lolita, which I re-read earlier this year).
And for [redacted], exactly! Admittedly, I didn't think too much of how the trope while writing this game (whereas subverting the teacher/student trope, for example, was in my mind while writing High School Lolita), but I just thought that, if I am to make a horror VN about [redacted], then [redacted] should take centre stage as the source of the horror!
For the sound effects and the jumpscares, very fair, that's something quite difficult to balance, so I'm happy with it, but that will definitely be a hit or miss in the gameplay experience haha. But I had fun using those, as I don't think many VNs present them that way (I can only think of DDLC, and I guess, to some extent, of Totono's "I'm taking to YOU")? Although, checking the "Jump Scares" tag on VNDB, there are quite a handful of VNs having those, so I just gotta play more!
And that's right for the foreign text, I thought it added to the mystery (I mean, except for the French-speaking audience loool), while evoking those books/prefaces from past centuries including untranslated texts (personally, I read a lot of 17th-century literature, and they constantly do that with Latin haha).
Thank you once more for sharing your thoughts and opinions, they were great to read!!