My favorite entries of the jam this year are looking squarely at poverty, the impermanence of homes, othering, and how parents' ownership over their children under these systems compromises their mutual ability to connect. i put some other thoughts in the fluxer very flippantly earlier, before i had finished the game, and having finished, this story is quite painful. the violence aimed at: women, dark skin, fat bodies.
I'm thinking a lot about Blanche's self-flagellation toward the end and how it reframes the Scarlet section.
One element I wanna call out because it stands out to me, how real and painful it is to see the skinny white girl, the only girl who deigns to hang out with Letty at school, shrug her shoulders when Letty tries to open up. How she says "Go to therapy" and wipes her hands of the situation. Ostensibly, they're both bullied loners, but Friend is reproducing the same hierarchies with Scarlet that have them quarantined them from the rest of their classmates. It reinforces how many other invisible layers of social support (mostly offscreen) have failed by siloing these two off via any number of mundane violences.
I loved the art, I enjoyed the sound.
To writing craft: you have a very gentle and direct style that's both easy to read and full of emotion, especially during exposition. On the other hand your dialog and mental narration was less consistent in my opinion, especially in the second half when there were a handful of important moments where a character would say something that felt kind of canned to me and pulled me out of the story. I think another editing pass through the Blanche section could make the VN go absolutely haywire.
Thanks so much for making this game. I really enjoyed it.