A Werewolf in Charleston feels... dense. It's about many things at once - self actualization, religious zealotry, gay love, the inefficacy of peaceful protests in the face of authoritarian rule, and the fact that it would probably be really fucked up if you had a wolf inside your body which desperately wanted out.
Unfortunately, I'd say it does too much at once - and certainly far too much to fit within the jam's 25k word count. The topics covered here are incredibly sensitive, and by the story's own admission, it's not subtle at all about depicting them - by the point you've finished the story, you've seen werewolves undergo a downright staggering amount of hate crimes, with very little breathing room in-between. At best, it manages to portray just how awful these things are, but at worst, it feels like it's using them for shock value more so than to make an actual point. It serves as a constant reminder of just how grim things are for the werewolves - but with every additional dead background character that is glossed over for the sake of moving on to the next shocking scene, every werewolf added to the pile of dead bodies, it feels as though the story cares less and less about just how horrifying it all is, and more about moving on to the next action scene.
It's not as though the story doesn't address this at all - but what matters is the scale of it all. A scene or two of Oliver grieving the dead and regretting the mistakes that led them there simply does not feel like enough when the scale of these deaths is so large - over the course of the story, Oliver witnesses dozens of werewolves dying in tragedies that are meant to reflect very real events that occurred in America - from both far in the past, and in very recent times, with direct allusions to events such as the Pulse shooting - and when dealing with topics such as this, it is imperative to treat them with the respect they deserve rather than as just minor setpieces in a story. Ironically enough, this winds up making the characters feel downright inhuman - those who survive come off as incredibly callous to what they've seen over the course of the story, and those who die wind up being nothing more than a statistic - just more anonymous werewolves murdered in cold blood by the bigots of the city, rather than people with rich inner lives that deserve to be mourned.
With all that said, however, I do think that there's a ton to like in this visual novel - the presentation is downright incredible, with the various sound cues and animated visuals that are presented elevating many of the more dramatic scenes by a ton - it's something that's incredibly rare to see in the medium, and which I'll dearly miss when moving on to other works, because it really does make for some incredible scenes.
On the story level, I also think there's a lot of good stuff. Where the story is at its strongest is when it covers the body horror inherent to being a werewolf - the initial scenes of the MC trying to hide his condition under wrap come to mind, with the direction of the visuals and audio coming together to make for something that is truly horrifying - but incredibly engrossing to watch as they unfold (not going to mention the specifics, because I do think it's worth reading the story just to experience these scenes). Growth and change, while positive, are not always clean or pretty - and this story makes it very clear. Lycanthropy is portrayed as a fundamental part of one's being - and one that, if mishandled and not properly accepted, will fester until it explodes into displays of gratuitous violence and body horror, brought forth by one's own inner demons breaking free. It's a metaphor that works very well to display the dangers of bottling up parts of yourself and hiding your true self from the real world, and I also really liked the repeating metaphor of the "mercy-killing" throughout the work and what that eventually culminated in.
Ultimately, I think the problem here is mostly one of scope relative to the jam's constraints - there's the bones for a bunch of very intriguing and compelling stories here, but combining them all into such a short runtime means that the breakneck pacing of it all and the sheer amount of dramatic scenes winds up negatively affecting the writing and storytelling in ways which I don't assume were intentional. Regardless, I do think that there's a lot to enjoy here, and it still manages to be quite the entertaining read all throughout.