You wore a lot of hats for this jam. Solo developers end up needing to, but you went out of your way to do your own sprites and music, and I remember you giving updates on your work on the 3D environments you used for the backgrounds, and that seemed like quite a bit of work. The character sprites are all finished, the backgrounds and music are present, and there are even a lot of CGs, which is an accomplishment when you’re doing this many things for a jam entry by yourself.
I get a headache looking at some of the backgrounds (Tortilla Ringer, the park). I’m not sure what it is about them, exactly. The blurring, maybe.
I think the writing has problems with focus. During the meeting with tacos, there are a lot of detailed but dry statements about how exactly they eat the tacos, but I’m not sure what meaning it provides. If it was from Aryaman’s point of view and the narrator had never seen fast food packaging before, it would make more sense, but Tyler has eaten this food a lot before.
Later, the grocery trip takes up a little over three lines of text in the text box, done in summary. I’m left wondering why it isn’t either shorter or longer. It not being longer could have to do with assets and time required. Aryaman’s and Tyler’s relationship is also kind of skimmed over, and I was expecting Aryaman to need to leave or something based on something he says early in the VN, but it didn’t come up.
The scene where people bought books in the library went on for a long time, and that felt like the peak of what this VN was trying to accomplish. It has the kind of character interactions over the day-to-day of a bookstore owner that seems like the kind of thing slice-of-life promises. It has to do with Tyler’s business problem, Aryaman’s magic, and Aryaman’s and Tyler’s relationship (when Aryaman interferes magically without asking Tyler first). Deva and Juniper hang out. Characters are being cute (Deva especially. He’s a good foil to grumpy old man Tyler.). The rest of Aryaman’s and Tyler’s relationship doesn’t quite build on this, though, with their problems and interactions having to do with other things. You’ve said that there was a scene at the end that was cut for (development) time, if I recall correctly, but I don’t think that that would have made their relationship arc more deliberate in the way that I’m looking for.