"Can I come over and stare at you like this while we frot" - me to my partner along with a screenshot from the game
Gonna start with that I really liked the game and its pretense, and as always I appreciate someone swinging for/on behalf of the trans homies. The presentation is phenomenal, the way the music compliments the difference between Regular Mormon Junior and Oliver, the guitar riffs on the werewolf reveals, the CGs. As always it's the level of tight production quality I expect from a Corvus production ;> I think it's also fun seeing where your art has come from, from your first vn last year!
Speaking of last year, it's interesting to see the change of... opinion? Sensibility? I'm not sure exactly how to phrase it, but I remember very well Route 19 having a lynching as a tool of justice, and here we see lynching as the hate crime it is. The story is where my problems are, however. I think the overall arc makes sense, and the prose is just fine, but I think the overall is a bit ambitious to fit into a game jam. At 24,922 words I see we're really edging that limit, so I think it's just a scope greater than what you can fit into a jam with a word limit. Because the pacing is what suffers. We just jump through plot beat by plot beat, and I think that leaves us with a lot of heavy things or revelations that don't have time to sit, or be processed. Ollie finds out he's queer, he's a werewolf, he kills someone, he has to permanently become a werewolf, god may or may not be real but the moon spirit probably is, his church sucks, his dad killed his mom, his people are oppressed, etc, all in the course of a month and we just kind of move from beat to beat like "well, never felt this way before. but there's only 15k words left and we've got several action scenes, so no time for that." I will excuse him telling Luis that he loves him since this is first, and it's pretty easy to get a bit eager with that. I do think there's some leaps in logic that suffer as well. I get Oliver feeling inspired and like he has to do something, with regards to the 50 person protest... but also no one told him that was a terrible idea? Werewolves are open season and strung up in the streets and no one took the time to go "dude if we gather all in one place they'll just cut us down because they think we're subhuman or worse?" I just feel like we didn't really think this one through.
And I get killing your dad probably changes you fundamentally, but it feels like quite a jump from who he was to "i have to become a revolutionary werewolf super soldier." I think we also suffer the zootopia problem where there are legitimately dangerous things about werewolves. I mean turning into something you have no choice over is a very classic queer horror trope, and I've got a lot of respect for it, but we've got a lot of things that parody queer struggles, but racial struggles as well. And historically there are a lot of crossover there! A lot of our queer rights frontrunners were also bipoc! But the thing about race and identity is that they're not meaningful separations between us. On the flip side, werewolves are very much capable of killing people unarmed, and if they don't transform on the bloodmoon they turn into raging body horror monsters. Luis also speaks several times about how humans are scum, which doesn't really get any pushback. It just comes across very Black and White, Good and Evil, and I don't think it's ever that simple.
Sorry Rhettoe I feel like I always open all my feedback for you with "Great work, he's several paragraphs of my problems" 😭 but I genuinely think it's because your work has so much to like about it and such good ideas that it opens opportunity for feedback! You've got a phenomenal output, and really ambitious ideas that I think you, for the most part, back up pretty well. I'm impressed, and I hope you're proud of yourself! As always I look forward to what you make next and getting to the theatre once i finish all these maywolves