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As I see it, Lunar Folly succeeds in many ways. Structurally and audiovisually sound, this game offers a surprisingly complete experience for a game jam entry. Still, there were a handful of issues that kept it from being great, in my opinion. 

For one, the way the characters speak is a little too modern for a medieval fantasy setting. Most of the time, this aspect is pretty easy to ignore, but a certain point, the MC describes feeling as if he was "hit by a bus," which bothered me greatly.

Other than that, the games suffers from what I see as a pacing issue, which manifested in to main forms for me. Firstly, the story starts at a pretty odd point — not really in media res, but two seconds before something major happens. This left a great deal of the start of the story catching up to the plot, establishing stakes after they were first relevant. The second issue with the pacing happens at the end. There, a proper resolution to the story's external conflicts is sacrificed for the sake of tying up internal conflicts and a sex scene. It doesn't help that, for the former, the solution was having the same conversation twice in a row but with different characters.

That said, the most pervasive issue in this project, as I see it, is a sense of heavy-handedness towards its themes. I think the parallels to real life are solid, but the way the VN presents them often makes characters chatterboxes for the writers. Sometimes, characters seem to just parrot ideas rather than coming off as if they arrived at them naturally.

Nevertheless, Lunar Folly is still a pretty good time. It looks great, the music choices were pretty fitting, and (despite the above) the writing works most of the time.

Thank you for the fantastic review

This one definitely struggled slightly under the weight of the story's own scale - with Mitch's internal conflict of choosing whether to abandon his humanity or not, the interpersonal conflict of Mitch not acknowledging his own privilege as a man in a patriarchal society, and the external conflict of the weight placed upon Mitch and Birdy by the village are all occurring at once, I knew I couldn't do them all justice within the word limit of the game jam (and the month I had to work on the game) - ultimately I elected to leave the latter conflict as an 'unknown' for the future, rather than halfheartedly including it, given that the main goal of the story was to explore the former two and the callousness inherent to the fantasy of 'leaving it all behind' like Mitch desired.

The heavy-handedness was also something I was tweaking right up until I released the VN - I definitely agree that the story wound up being a bit too explicit about its folklore-related themes (mainly out of an anxiety that people wouldn't pick up on them and would think that it started and ended at werewolves being there). It's something I've definitely got on the mind for the eventual post-jam patch.

Though I will have to nitpick a bit and say that Mitch never described something as being hit by a bus, he just used the term 'throw under the bus' in a sentence, even if I do agree with you on the matter of the language used being too modern as a whole.