Mundilactes had my attention from the screenshots showing off the beautiful art alone, but the very short Itch page description had me intrigued too. In retrospect, that little blurb is ended up telling us exactly what's in store for us.
I'll get to the visuals first – I have only good things to say. I absolutely adore every visual element of the game. The textbox is lovely with nicely contrasted text and an elegant but readable font, the little portraits are lovely, and everything else just... wow! The painted backgrounds are extremely my jam. I love the style and brushstrokes, and the fact that everything has earthy colours of autumn and decay gives it such a strong persistent mood and it absolutely looks gorgeous to boot. You really feel that this world is stagnant, the slow degradation of everything in cycles is the norm and the ability to preserve instead of renew is the best we can hope for. The colours of autumn get dropped only when scenes of extreme terror or wonder happen, which makes them pop out even more. I loved the contrast and interaction between organic and mechanical, with all the horrible black goo that is somewhere in the uncomfortable middle.
My only minor complaint is that the textbox does cover up almost half of the screen. While this isn't a problem in itself, it's a shame that some of the full screen illustrations get covered up. For most of them this isn't a problem since the composition is such that all the important elements are on the right side of the illustration, but there are a few exceptions. It wouldn't be a bad idea to have the UI fade out and back in existence when scenes change and new illustrations are shown.
The main menu and the little animation that plays at the start of the game is also a treat. It' makes you wonder on your first playthrough, sets the tone, but also makes you understand it subsequent playthroughs. I always love when things from the beginning get recontextualised.
Last visual element is of course the sprites. My god, I could gush about them for so long. The character designs are very simple, but their demeanor, stature and more than anything expression tell us everything. The main trio's design being so generic, but their personalities coming through other ways is such a perfect choice for a cast of shapeshifters. The highlights of the sprites for me are basically everything the fossa does, the horrific, but still not unbearable through some clever vagueness "ouch" variants of the deer, and of course the leopard's getting the iconic kitty gleam in his eyes when he's happy.
The one very glaring flaw is the complete absence of audio, but this will get remedied in the post jam polish update I hope. My playthrough had the Majula theme from Dark Souls 2 playing quietly in the background on Youtube and I must admit, it fit surprisingly well. Make of that what you will and I guess give it a shot while we wait for some audio to be added.
As for the writing and the story, I enjoyed it as much as the visuals. It is very noticeable that this is a script translated from French to English and it has some quirks because of that. Some sentence structures sound unnatural, and the fact that the main trio doesn't have names and is referred to by profession makes it stick out when their titles get changed a lot in a way that seemed more like indecisiveness of the translation than a deliberate choice. The descriptions used for the hauler leopard seemed to struggle the most when trying to pinpoint what is his role in the mission. But then again such was his role in the story as well, love your energy girl, give us nothing! 🐆💅
I personally didn't mind the dodgy translated English, since I feel like it worked well for the disorienting and ambiguous tone the story had. Everything was just slightly alien and off, and you were never really sure if the game is trying to misdirect you on purpose, the characters struggle to articulate what they uncovered, or something was simply lost in the purple flower field of prose,
As for the story structure, I think it was clever. We have a very clear mission statement, we go and do the thing, come back, bim bam bosh, done! Sounds easy, right? Well, things end up being more complicated on several levels, and those several wrenches in the plan made the entire thing so fun. The initially unclear stakes and setting do a lot of the heavy lifting here.
There was a lot of ambiguity about what is going on, what are we doing, why are we doing this, why do we care, where you don't really understand many of these elements due to how strange this world and its society is. I love how those get revealed, and not through one playthrough only either. I enjoyed how all the pieces of the puzzle are sprinkled through the story, and some are pretty subtle and require you to pay attention and think about what is said and what is being deliberately left out. The multiple endings that all range from "this is a disaster" to "this was a mess" were fun and I enjoy that you will be confused or disturbed when first seeing them, but as you see more and more the picture will become clear.
One last thing that I keep thinking about is the reaction of a friend when we finished reading this. I very cockily proclaimed that I understand the story and how it wasn't so obtuse once you simply read the entire thing and it gives you all the information. His takeaway was that he didn't understand anything, and how our understanding of the literal events of the story are just scratching the surface of what they actually mean, represent or imply. And I think that's the best part. If you're like him, you can go hunting for some greater meaning and chase for celestial fishies. If you're like me, you'll get a fun story with the option to retreat into what is familiar and curl up into troubled sleep, left with a lot to ponder.
All in all, I found Mundilactes to be a very creative and well executed little jam game. I highly recommend it to everyone and I hope we get the final 1.0 version.