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.