This VN is one of many I started and didn’t finish, but I thought to leave my thoughts anyways.
Having so many custom game elements as soon as you open the game and start playing/fiddling around with menus is impressive. Music, UI, sprites, background, audio captions. I think this is the first time I’ve seen someone change the formatting of the history screen like this, and it makes for a nicer experience reading through it like it was a book/script instead of a reference tab. The shifting text box background is something I turned off because it looked distracting. The cursor and taskbar icon look nice, though I prefer having a cursor that looks more obviously like a cursor. I’m glad that was also able to be toggled.
The renaming of the options to battle-themed terms like “retreat” was too cute for my liking. I know what all the options do, but I still had to stop and think a little about if the thing I wanted to do was actually going to be associated with the button I was about to press. “Exit” and “Retreat” being two options meaning separate things was particularly bad. “Exit” leading to “Forfeit the battle?” with “Flee to desktop.” and “Persist.” as options adds friction to interacting with the UI in a way that pretty borders and non-Ren’Py-default positions for buttons on the main menu don’t. It doesn’t ruin the experience, but I don’t think that this degree of theming is worth the sacrifice in clarity, especially to people who are unfamiliar with Ren’Py. I think most readers will be familiar with Ren’Py due to this niche being, well, such a niche, but it’s something important to think about regardless.
My impression of the main menu is that it looks kind of like the main menu of some war strategy game. Fire Emblem, Age of Empires. It’s got the big logo with the sword (and it’s kind of shaped like a shield) and the scenery’s scrolling in the background. I’m not sure how true to the actual game this impression is, but from what I could tell it’s a little mismatched in that it doesn’t seem like a main menu screen for a story about a small group of people that takes place away from the battlefield. Getting to the story, I didn’t get a handle on what direction it was going in. We get introduced to Raf, Ulfor, and Aella early, but I didn’t get a clear narrative hook. There’s some conflict between Aella and Ulfor, but it seemingly resolves itself almost as soon as it’s presented, with everyone talking it out and apologising. Looking at the game page description for the first time, I’m seeing that they’re all telling stories to each other, and I can see it getting there, but that’s not something I would have been able to see without reading the description. There wasn’t very much movement to the story, and I think the opening could be cut down a lot (you know, grain of salt, didn’t read the whole thing).
I like that the character sprites move around on the screen and we can see the fire flicker. Aella poking his head out from the side in the dark at the beginning is cute. However, there are some moments where the text says that characters are in one place, but they’re arranged differently on the screen. Like when Ulfor is approaching from behind Raf, but his sprite appears from the side of the screen that Raf is facing. It makes the visual presentation disjointed from the text.
Regarding the music, it was very… present? And not entirely in a good way. It could have something to do with the audio captions taking up so much space on the screen whenever they’re shown, but I have a general impression that the music was bigger than what suited the “two to three guys alone around a campfire” setting. The trumpet music accompanying Aella’s appearance is also very chipper, and I’m not sure if this is intentional to go with Aella’s seeming lack of engagement in the seriousness of the situation. It breaks the intimacy of the scene with the other two around the fire alone, and there’s a contrast between it and the music that comes on when he says he volunteered and Ulfor gets mad, but it’s strangely lighthearted for the generally gloomy story/situation. It could also be due to the setting changing later and the music being reused between settings. I’m not sure.
For reference/context, the last part I got to was where Ulfor apologises to Aella after Aella talks about how he got to be in the war.