Alright, last May Wolf '26 review!
No sliding tile puzzles in this one. 10/10 no further comments.
...I suppose I should actually talk about this for real.
Very creative idea, as most FdRstar projects tend to be from my limited experience with them, and easily the one that best captured the essence of the theme. Not perfect necessarily, but this was still really well done and a great entry to close on.
Implementation of Theme:
A+++. The whole thing is literally about how folklore itself is shaped and manipulated by its tellers and keepers for better or for worse. I'll get more into how that plays out in the "Story" section, but as far as implementation of theme goes, this absolutely crushed it.
Presentation/Writing:
Good, mostly, if a bit basic at times. No penalties for the use of stock assets in the folktale retellings, and this actually worked kind of well as a justification for using the same sprites, since folk figures can often be associated with multiple myths, as demonstrated by Mura and Urosa here. I want to give a special shout as well to the sprite manipulation with one of the witches gets caught in the snare. There wasn't anything wrong with the music per se, but it did seem weirdly loud without adjusting the settings and I thought it was a little distracting while trying to focus on the actual gameplay element.
Text was mostly well proofread, though there were a few typos and instances of awkward phrasing that could've been things getting lost in translation. Tone was generally kept light throughout, though there were a few instances where I wasn't sure just how light we were supposed to be. There are some pretty heavy themes in the subtext here, and Chayon occasionally gets pretty heated about them, which makes gags like the wrong recorder picture feel a little random. Not really the biggest issue, but maybe that was some of the language elsewhere not conveying the tone the way it was intended instead.
Story:
It's a bit interesting to me that the game page for this entry states one of the central conflicts of this story, "The new generation doesn't know their stories aside from the "official" version that had been purged of anything deemed controversial," so explicitly, while in the VN itself this is buried in subtext. I prefer the latter approach, since it gives the reader an opportunity to learn and infer more about Chayon's traits, history, and biases as the process continues, but I also wonder if the reader is supposed to have that background in mind, and whether some might miss it if they were just downloading all the jam entries and didn't read that description.
That all said, I think the complexity of folklore and the way it can be handled by different groups of people is well represented here. It's hard to know what the true "original" story is, with the archival versions incomplete and mostly focusing on adherence to religion, the "official" versions censoring or changing certain details to enforce the state's values, and Chayon's versions incorporating some of their own personal biases, experiences, and grudges against the state.
I think it's interesting that Chayon's accounts of the tales sometimes mirror this theme within the folktale itself. In the archival and official accounts of the inventor and the automaton, the story is about maintaining control and the consequences of giving too many concessions to your creation, whereas Chayon's version is a defense of individual liberties, regardless of if the way someone chooses to use their freedom is what was envisioned by their creator (e.g., society) or not. Clearly Chayon takes issue with the characterization of witches as untrustworthy or evil as well, seeing them as a stand-in for being "othered" by a discriminatory government. That said, and maybe this is one of the things that kind of got lost in translation, but Chayon's moral of the second story doesn't really make sense to me either? Like "making people do their work" sounds kind of... overseer-y? I wondered while reading this compared to the other options if a better conclusion might be something like "cooperation is always better than being selfish". It's also never explicitly stated what Chayon's exact trauma is, but I did find it interesting that characterizing the witches as "charlatans" gives you an immediate bad end, though given the fact pattern of the story, this might not actually be the worst takeaway since while Mura was doing all those fetch quests, the village was still suffering and maybe he should have considered finding a third opinion.
With all that said, I think there's some healthy nuance in the story's approach to Chayon as well. It's worth noting that you only get the special Mura ending if you push back against Chayon past a certain threshold. There are plenty of details in these stories that aren't all that important, like whether the witches needed flowers or mushrooms, but some of the changes made to the tales are Chayon trying to inject their own ideals to be normalized throughout society, which in itself isn't materially different from what the state did. It's up to the next keeper/teller of the story, in this case Homeka, to determine what's appropriate to keep and what should be corrected.
Creativity:
Not sure what else I can say for this category that hasn't already been said, but of course full marks here. This was a great implementation of the jam theme in a VN that also incorporated some unique gameplay elements to get its core themes across. Really great work here.
Final score of 10 adult Pinocchio puppets with functioning dicks out of 3 Geth that also have functioning dicks.