Lots of success with presentation here: character designs that immediately tell you a lot about what everyone is like, skillful synthesis of different art styles to fit the purposes of each scene, brilliant color coordination that makes the VN feel like a cohesive whole. And even a very cool logo... There's definitely some unevenness – I wish the campfire animation was a little better for all the time we spend staring at it, and as gorgeous the UI is, it genuinely feels like a big oversight to not have colored names for the speakers – but on the whole, it's a lot of really solid work. (I realize this is more of a nitpick, but it's also kind of odd that the grain seems to be more prominent in bright areas, which is the opposite of how it usually works.) On the music side, I must note that Pink made yet another banger Sex Music mp3.
On a general level, I also enjoyed the writing. While I don't necessarily get the use of 2nd person mostly in that it singles out Raf's perspective & interiority very strongly in a way that seems incongruent with how the VN positions its three primary characters, the prose is always nice to read, and the unpretentious, matter-of-fact tone suits the story. All in all, though, I'm having somewhat of a hard time wrapping my head around how well I think everything ultimately comes together.
I think a lot of my doubts come down to the tension between the VN's minimalist "three people sitting around the campfire" setup and its gestures towards more far-reaching topics and stakes. For example: the folklore theme, courtesy of the jam, often comes off as a bit strained. We get a lot of stuff about folklore as a source of prejudice in particular, but the story's tight focus on the core trio doesn't leave it with a lot of opportunities to shape it into effective drama – as a social milieu, the camp is ultimately pretty loosely described, so what we get usually boils down to the characters thinking about what kinds of stories they tell about whatever species. (As a sidenote, even the theme of the relations between the officers, normal soldiers, the medics fades into the background as the story goes on, which I found a little strange.)
Maybe what specifically feels strained to me is that how bluntly functional the game is about folklore: it's so often directly aspirational or a direct inspiration for prejudice or behavior. I'm meant to understand that the characters like hearing and telling stories, but for this being the case, the dimension of aesthetics is oddly downplayed. A part of it is probably that a layer of complexity is removed when the characters are all anthros and their tales revolve around animals taken as direct parallels for actual people. To state the obvious, this is not how it works in the real world: the fox in the animal fable probably ought to be read as an image of a kind of person but not a concrete group of fox guys who actually exist out there, making the entire story take on a more symbolic, more ambiguous meaning. So while the VN is definitely "about folklore", it's concerned with folklore specifically as an element of furry worldbuilding. While this is obviously not a bad angle to pursue, to me it feels a little unsatisfying that the story misses out on getting to talk about everything that's interesting about folktales in the world we live in, namely that they're aesthetic objects people can have all sorts of complex feelings about.
Another thing that comes to mind (re: the tension between everything the VN tries to do) is how though the situation with the food feels like a good metonym for the harsh conditions the characters face in theory, the threat of the dwindling rations ultimately remains a little too abstract. I'm thinking about this line, for instance: "It’s been a long summer, and now that fall has set in, many of the nicer rations have run out." Like, sorry for the CinemaSins, but unless the world is higher-tech than we've been lead to believe and they have like a train that brings in new stuff, I feel like they'd probably have run out long ago by the time the story ends. (There's of course foraging and looting from nearby villages and so on, but it's still a bit much for how enormously important and difficult logistics of food were in premodern times, and arguably still are.)
It's not that I need to have this egregious plot hole addressed, but to me, the story feels like it doesn't always know when to sketch out things in more detail and when to just ignore it. The fact that we know very little about the war itself is perfectly appropriate; it would be the worst media literacy roll of the century to complain that we don't even get to hear why they're fighting. Meanwhile, though, a lot of what we get about the trio's day-to-day life in the camp comes off as too nonspecific and broadly described to provide the grounding we want from it. The food situation feels like a salient point in that it could spur dramatic incidents and generate an atmosphere of hopelessness, but instead it just remains a something we hear about every so often without the impression that it's actually a deathly important thing in the lives of the characters.
I think contributing to this is also the sparseness of the narration. Big timeskips come and go like it's nothing, and for all the time the characters hang out in that same spot – unless I'm missing something and they're actually moving around, which would admittedly make sense – it doesn't really come off as a place. The backgrounds do such a good job at establishing the vibes that I wish the prose complemented them a little better.
All this is admittedly a bit difficult to talk about because in general, I think the story consists of affects, themes, ideas, and formal moves that make sense individually, and what I'm unsure about is only whether they cohere into the most potent expression of any of them. Basically, my question is: which way, visual novel? Are you a hyper-stripped down, hyper-lowkey character piece that dramatizes the pointlessness of war with purposeful absences and an intentionally loose sense of time and place? Or do you flirt with the weight of material stakes (the food situation being insane, the injuries the guys get from being in combat) and occasional spectacle (in the form of the two misdirects, the dramatic backstories, the big moments realized with exquisite visuals, and the emotionally satisfying conclusion)? I think you could probably get a stronger whole by committing harder to an interesting shape rather than picking the best bits from multiple ways to approach the premise. Still, though, it shouldn't be understated just how pleasant of a read the VN is and how strong many of its components are at the very least on their own.