Before I get into my criticisms, I do want to make it clear that I’m really, really excited for Engil’s route and the conclusion of this story. A lot of interesting ideas are raised and explored here, but this feels like the type of story where every single route contributes a lot to the overarching narrative - and having only two of three available right now still leaves things somewhat confusing (in particular, with regards to fleshing Engil out).
That said, I think my enjoyment of the story was in spite of its current state, rather than as a result of it. The sprites and CGs are certainly beautiful (I love your style so much honestly everyone looks so so good!!!), but the two available routes kind of fall apart visually as they reach the end, neglecting to even swap out backgrounds or to show multiple characters on-screen at the same time after a certain point.
Proofreading was also quite the issue here - with the later sections of the routes frequently leaving me confused due to key words in sentences being misspelled, and certain repeat occurrences such as characters saying “yea” instead of “yeah” which took me out of the experience. Oddly enough, I felt as though the earlier parts of the story had a run-on-sentence problem, but that faded away after a bit.
With all that said though, with regards to the story itself, I really did enjoy this a lot - the story tackles a lot of very intense subjects, but it feels as though they all wind up returning to the central themes of sin and absolution, on both a personal and a communal scale - which helps bring everything together quite well (and is part of why I’m very excited for Engil’s route - because I want to see how that will evolve on these central themes).
It’s the type of advantage that only route-focused visual novels have - each route having its own central ideas and focuses that still all add up to one central ‘thesis statement’ that it’s making - and I think this visual novel does it very well. That said, I did feel as though the route select choice was a bit… arbitrary? It kind of felt like the story decided to arbitrarily split off at some point, and every character who wasn’t the ‘route character’ kinda disappeared into the aether the moment the route selection choice was made. Engil’s the one exception to that - but his route isn’t available yet.
While not a deal-breaker, that is kind of a shame in my opinion - because I feel as though there is a lot of interesting stuff to be mined from seeing how the route characters interact with one another past the intro of the game - especially once the stakes become more extreme. Solis, Lillia, and Engil all feel very well-realized to me, and as though they would have a lot to talk about once they let down their guard a bit more - which is part of why the disappearance of the other characters after the route selection was a bit disappointing to me.
That said, I did really enjoy what is there - and, like I said, I feel as though Engil’s route is very likely to be the final ‘missing piece’ to this story, so I’m very interested in seeing what it’ll be like!