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(1 edit)

Pretty good: the pacing is steady, the concept works, and there's some very clever foreshadowing for the twist. If you want to come up with something to grumble about, I think the fact that the plot is so focused on explanations of the rites and the wolf's inner story kind of robs the finale of some of its impact. I feel like the story is so eager to surprise the reader that it doesn't take every opportunity it could to underscore the strangeness of what we're lead to believe is happening or provide development in the form of increasingly weird details.

Granted, I see what the VN tried to do with its sound design, but unfortunately, the technical implementation lead me to miss most of it as I read. The cricket sounds in the title screen were so quiet that I assumed it was – in line with the minimalist visuals – meant to be silent and neglected to adjust my volume, ending up not hearing most of the audio. (Worth noting: this is another reason to allow accessing settings in the title screen, since I guess not having the volume sliders available made me think sound wasn't going to be that important.) Actually, I'm not too sad about playing with a low volume, because that final sound effect is way too loud! Shocking the reader with an unexpected harsh sound suffices as a jumpscare; it doesn't have to also be loud enough to kill headphone users.

On the visual side, though, I basically like almost everything. The shifts in art style make sense and result in the presentation being quite engaging even with the limited amount of art, and the sun appearing as a bright hole in the paper in the sketch-style CG is an insanely cool visual idea. As far as the character designs go, I get that the simplicity is meant to communicate the ordinariness of these people, but I think there's maybe just slightly too much that and too little anything else. The color combinations aren't particularly pleasant, for example, and there just aren't any neat details for your eyes to focus on. I can imagine better ways to balance between the same fundamental vibe and creating attractive, interesting designs.

My biggest criticism, and what ultimately prevented me from really immersing myself in the story, comes down to the prose. I think the VN would generally benefit from a thorough editing round; there are many of instances of slightly confusing phrasing, and the style feels wordy but mostly because it goes so often for the long, clumsy way to say something. There are a lot of lines I like, but also plenty where the specific choice of words or the rough sentence structure prevents the intended emotion from coming through. Everyone already complained about "saline solution" in the comments, so let me grab some other examples for the sake of demonstrating what I'm talking about:

"A distinct lack of chatter still filled the arid air, only sometimes interrupted by steps shuffling somewhere near."

Here, two conflicting descriptions of silence are smashed together. If it's specifically a "lack of chatter", then it doesn't make sense for steps specifically, rather than chatter, to interrupt it.

"Somehow, the touch of the stranger flooded Lucas with a deeply familiar feeling, not unlike a scent recognized from childhood, long forgotten with time."

I think the "with time" part is totally extraneous here – I'm not too crazy about the "long forgotten" part being there either, as I feel like just "from childhood" might be enough to conjure a sense of nostalgia, but I'd cut at least that part. I feel like it's not too poetic and semantically redundant; time is automatically the cause when something is "long forgotten [from childhood]".

"All parts of the firmament fled, as the orbit dragged them to the safety of other skies. But the sun remained—firmly held in place—something subject only to the cruel whims of fate."

Here's another example of that first thing where two senses of the word "remain" are mixed up. If the sun stays in the same location as everything else goes away, it's remaining in a physical place, as the em dash addition says; on the other hand, to "remain subject to the whims of fate" is instead an abstract thing.

"The previously bitter cold of the air pushing against him—now left unwarded against— grew nauseating and hateful."

Now that I mention it, I feel like em dashes are kind of overused in the script, and here's another example of the part separated with them not really agreeing with the surrounding line. If I'm understanding this right, we're first talking about the bitter cold of the air, then the em dash addition focuses on him, and after it we're back to the cold (which "grows nauseating and hateful"). However, I'm not sure what the word "against" is doing. Is it trying to refer to the cold? I feel like you can't really do that syntactically, and I think the flow is bad in any case.

Also, as a smaller polish thing, the punctuation is messy throughout. Two different kinds of apostrophes (' and ’) are used at random, interruptions are sometimes done with a hyphen and sometimes with an em dash, and spacing around em dashes is also a little inconsistent. I don't know what kind of writing process produces these kinds of problems – maybe it's just pasting back and forth between different word processors – but I think it's worth the effort to make everything consistent.

All in all, I like the bones of what's happening here a lot, and the use of the jam theme is good. In the moments where the VN really works, it's a beautiful thing to read, but I feel like the writing issues were frequent enough to stop me from really loving it. With the minimalist presentation, it's largely up to the prose to do the work of setting the mood, and I don't think it quite gets there.