itch.io

Hello! I don't know if this is a good place to write thoughts on this, but no one can stop me from doing it here. I'm a big fan of the webnovel, and so this is very exciting to see; TFTBN is really fertile ground for a mystery VN, and you seem to have really hit the ground running. The art for the characters is pretty solid (Su and Ran are adorableeee), but I am particularly in love with the UI elements (the 23-segmented character display thingy in particular, it's wild that you made that look so cool) and gorgeous background paintings. I also think the little discipline icons for the characters look very very good. The little lore glossary is also extremely welcome in a format with fewer long expository sequences. The music doesn't blow me away, but it isn't distracting, so it's cleared the most important hurdle imo. As for the writing, I have enjoyed the webnovel so far, so no huge complaints there. On first blush I'm not a huge fan of the new framing device, but I can pretty easily chalk that up to adaptation sickness and trust that it will work out fine. My main criticism is that the writing really needs another editing pass or two. The long and exhaustive thing works fine in the webnovel, but this is a different medium, and it feels weird to have Su tell us that she got up from a chair when we also literally see her do that. It just feels like it just sort of takes the wind out of the sails a little bit to see something happen and then have Su cut away briefly to describe the thing that is happening, or lay out the already-obvious subtext of a conversation we just saw happen. I don't want to include any spoilers here so I am trying to keep it light on specific examples, but this happens quite a lot throughout the demo, and it's pretty jarring. Overall, though, I really loved it and am very excited to see how this goes!