Very strong showing for someone's (to my knowledge) first published VN! Apart from the scope issues I'll get to later, the story feels very confident in choosing the things it wants to focus on: it's a pretty literal interpretation of the folklore theme and light on tension & scares, but on the other hand, the down-to-earth tone works for the game's seamless mixing of fun hangout scenes, cryptid intrigue, light character drama, and horniness. While the prose tends towards simplistic, the exceptionally smooth investigation scenes add a lot of character to how the plot is conveyed and help the clues and the lore come off as tangible. All in all, the feels quite strategic in what it downplays and what it emphasizes and good at maintaining a consistent tone of disarming casualness. I think this is the kind of thing that's often invisible to readers but ultimately counts for a lot.
There's a lot of good stuff happening in the visuals as well; firstly, the photo backgrounds do a lot of work to ground the story and make the cryptid jumpscare jarring in just the correct way. It's so good how mundane the intro segment is – not least because of the blatant Wawa product placement – and then, suddenly, the Jersey Devil is here and unambiguously real. The story really captures the impression that the boys have accidentally stumbled into something way beyond their pay grade.
And speaking of: the character designs are so so good, I'm obsessed with everyone in this. The use of color is particularly strong; Terry's and Shane's designs highlight their faces beautifully while the mysterious side characters are a bit more muted as a whole, and everyone's outfit is appropriately casual but nice to look at. Macaulay's bulge is a respectably insane design decision out of context, but I do like how it makes his intentions and role in the game difficult to parse. I imagine many a reader's thoughts bounced between "threesome?" and "axe murderer?"
Anyway, maybe you've already gotten a lot of this kind of feedback, but just for the sake of being thorough, I'll say that the dev having run out of time is somewhat apparent. What jumps out to me primarily is that the three side characters all fall just short of having satisfying arcs – with each getting an introduction, something unexpected that completes or complicates the character profile, and then a missing final beat – and that the investigation segments get simpler as the game goes on. The first two or three do a good job at creating a logical gameplay progression by utilizing all the mechanics and the previously gathered evidence, but I don't believe we even use the Examine feature in the last two, which also rely a lot on the player just arbitrarily choosing the right topic of conversation to continue. So, on the whole, it does feel like there's a lot of unrealized ambition and a sense of the scope having been a little too big for a solo developer to handle.
On the other hand, though: points for the fact that the main plot with our duo gets to the finish line more or less unscathed! Shane's backstory is maybe the only element where I concretely felt like there was some missing development before the climax; when he mentioned regaining memories as a result of hanging out in the forest, I wish we had gotten a more gradual progression of that playing out instead of him just saying it happened. Having this aspect more actively present in the story would also have helped make the sense of danger in the climax a little more palpable, I think.
But the important stuff works: the characters have a fun dynamic, it's easy to get invested in their fates, there are stakes and dramatic angles that get explored as the story goes on, and the climax resolves all the big questions, even if some of it is just implied. I stress this in order to commend the dev for his determination in telling a complete story within the constraints of the jam rather than just leaving the VN unfinished and promising a conclusion sometime after (with a 50 % chance that it never comes). To readers going through the jam entries, I feel like it's a big source of disappointment and burnout to keep hitting "to be continued..." screens after promising openings. So, despite the fact that a post-jam polish update would probably do the VN some good, nice job with finishing the story for the jam version!
I have just a couple of other nitpicks as well. At least to me, the lack of a line end indicator (the symbol that shows up to let the reader know text is finished showing) makes playing through the VN quite janky; it's so easy to accidentally skip over a line. There were occasional typos and punctuation errors, though this kind of thing isn't obviously what matters in the big picture. Having snooped around the files, I can say that there are better ways to implement tinting on the sprites – I believe you can just set a color to multiply them directly – and the somewhat laborious method chosen here probably accounts for the colors generally feeling just a little inconsistent. (Some scenes didn't have a tint when it felt like they should and so on.) On the whole, though, this was a delight to read.