Let me preface this by saying that I think everyone involved made an amazing work. Not only did everyone put their whole pussies into this, I think Cygnus’s dance might be, individually, the most powerful scene in the whole jam. Sometimes with this kind of collaborations it is natural to think “this is being carried by the art” or “this is being carried by the writing” or similar, but in that scene everything coalesce superbly and it left a very strong impression on me. The writing! The art! The music! (I guess Mystic forgot to add a transition there, but they have suffered enough.)

However, I do think that this VN suffers a little bit from the whole being less the sum of its parts. I must admit I’m someone who tends to judge VNs very much holistically, so this affects my rating a little bit, but I would definitely hope to see these concerns addressed in the future because the ingredients all there!

I think this VN has a big hurdle to overcome in that it chose a very fractured structured composed of many disconnected and chronologically scattered scenes, that furthermore tend to be very short. While it’s a format that allows the game to give us a lot of information, it’s not a format that facilitates us getting emotionally involved in the story, because we’re never allowed to dwell on anything or to witness the characters natrually go from one state of mind to another. (Or, better, it happens way more infrequently than I would have liked.)

On a related note, this is just my opinion and writing advice, but I feel like the story did not do itself any favors by choosing to employ timeskips even before the fantastic memory machine is introduced! Such a device is a very useful tool so as to allow the story to abandon the limits of a specific contained timeframe, but the story already had no such limits from the very beginning! A structure à la “A Christmas Carol”, where the “framing device” is very grounded and contained (just 1-2 days) and then we use some kind of magic device to explore the past would have been more effective imho.

Besides this, purkka summarized what I feel like is my main issue with the story incredibly well: “the journey to Cygnus's memories being nonlinear but not really compensating with any other way to make it feel like we're making constant progress.” We’re shown a lot of vignettes, but their significance to Erin’s growth or them processing their grief is not always very apparent. This is also where my criticism of “Erin/Cygnus have no chemistry” or “Cygnus/Kosta have better chemistry” comes in. I’m not saying the characters are at fault, if anything it looks to me like a lot of love and thought was clearly put into their personalities and backgrounds. But how the narrative chooses to spend its limited resources is not always very efficient. We spend too much time establishing Cygnus and Kosta’s relationship (and their scenes are so effective at doing so to boot!), and that comes at the expense of what should be the focus of the story, which is Erin and Cygnus’s relationship. Kosta is a wonderful character, but I think the story should have just featured him in scenes that matter narratively while leaving his backstory implied. Instead, it is Erin to get that kind of treatment: we mostly focus on them on the present and leave the foundations of them and Cygnus’s relationship for the reader to infer!

Like in most of my reviews, I realize I tend to focus a lot more on the aspects I didn’t quite enjoy or that could be improved, so I just want to reiterate my overall impression is still very positive and everyone involved is rightfully very proud of what they did!

A somber and yet enriching VN. If there's one thing I feel the need to comment on during the start of the story, it's the fact that there's a very slight tendency to "tell not show". There are times when the characters communicate their feelings to each other bluntly, when that could have been communicated through actions or dramatic events instead. That being said, the story being told through flashbacks is still an effective method for sharing their relationship, particularly since we know from the very beginning that Cygnus will die. It does take away a lot of the suspense, but it's still hard to watch Erin being as self-sabotaging as he is. The VN's shift midway from being focused on Erin's emotions to Cygnus' emotions was also cleverly executed, as was the method of portraying Cygnus' emotions. The asynchronous nature helps to understand what happened better. The emotions flow more naturally from here on out, and it's not all sad, even. There's joy, anger, love, heartbreak. Cygnus' life is a roller coaster of emotions that is beautifully written as well. I really appreciate that it wasn't a depression conga that ended with like, suicide or whatever. I was actually expecting a traumatic ending and full-on tears. I know that would have been so easy to write, but I prefer it this way for sure. It was an unfortunate accident, but life is about so much more than just depression and loss. This is a celebration of life, and both Erin and Kosta know that. Beautiful VN, thanks for writing it.

In general I liked this a lot, but as the "submitted 9 minutes, 5 seconds before the deadline" feels spiritually true especially towards the end, I think I want to wait for a post-jam update before doing a more thorough reread and gathering my thoughts properly. In lieu of a more polished review, please accept some scattered notes:

– I think it took me until hearing that the author was inspired by Kentucky Route Zero before the magical realist touches fully clicked in place. The idea is good regardless, but the execution is maybe not as graceful as in the inspiration, which provides a much smoother on-ramp to the really surreal elements. The progression from the mine to the bureau to the museum to the distillery and so on feels very intentional in how it teaches the player what kind of stuff to expect and how to read it in relation to the game's societal themes. With this game, I can see some readers struggling with how fast and with how little setup we're dropped into an absolutely wild concept – I almost feel like it's something the story should either open with or build more gradually towards (maybe the ballet could also be weird and magical in some way, or something).

– I've seen others remark on the main couple's lack of chemistry, which I think is a good observation and ultimately very true to life. It reminded me of Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir duology (which are some of my favorite movies ever, so take this as praise) in how the story basically just takes the fact that these two are dating at face value without really attempting to narrativize or explain it. The vibe is that of a loosely recalled memory.

– I love all the art, and I think the art direction stays together pretty well, too. It's one of those VNs where even the stock image backgrounds feel like they were curated with care. Besides further customizing Ren'Py's default UI – which never does much favors to any sort of story – I think something representing an area of improvement would be logo design: the text logo is a noticeable weak part in the otherwise attractive itch cover image. It's only this kind of small stuff that makes it feel like the game is 95 % instead of 100 % of the way to looking fully polished visually.

– The pacing is not slow, but it's maybe slower than it could or should be mostly due to the journey to Cygnus's memories being nonlinear but not really compensating with any other way to make it feel like we're making constant progress. I don't mind that the department exists as little more than a way to make the story happen in principle, but I think there's maybe a missed opportunity to get more specific about what exactly Erin is doing there and why to give the events some shape and sense of urgency.

– On the character design front, I think the game strikes an excellent balance between making Cygnus look sort of ethereal and mystical (as if they were already a ghost) but not too out of place with the other characters.

Alright, I took a lot of notes during this one, so I'm going to do my best to condense my jumbled thoughts here. Ultimately, I think this had many bright spots where the strengths of the writing and its ability to highlight raw emotion shined, but it didn't really work for me as an overall arc. Looking through the comments, I see that they're almost overwhelmingly positive, so before I'm summarily burned at the stake for my heresy, let me try to break it down.

I'm mostly just gonna let this one rip in a stream of consciousness, so general spoiler warning from here on out. 

Handling presentation first, I think this was generally polished and well-done. I have a gripe or two for each that I'll get to, but I thought the sprites were well-drawn and expressive, the CGs were gorgeous (even if the Kosta x Cygnus sex scene CG was maybe a bit gratuitous), and the music generally worked well and complemented the scenes. 

Rapid fire notes on the above to get them out of the way: 

- I don't really mind the "blank" sprites to depict total NPCs who appear for a scene or two and don't affect the greater plot, but it does feel off when the sprite clearly doesn't match how the character is described. For comparison, the security guard's species isn't defined, so the blank sprite works well enough, but the boss is explicitly described as an owl and the sprite used looks vaguely canine. Could just be a personal thing, but I'd rather not have a sprite at all than one that doesn't match the character (and this feels conventionally acceptable for a character with one scene, even outside of jam limitations).

- Music felt inconsistently used in scenes where there's diegetic music present. Just like any other soundtrack, music in VNs can be used for generally setting emotional tone (you have a handle on that), but it can also represent the music actually playing (or not) in the scene and use that to set the atmosphere. If Cygnus turns off the music in the car, turn off the BGM. If the crew is at a karaoke bar, don't turn off the music. That kinda thing. 

- The phone screen text was a good effect, but there were times when the bottom of the phone screen was obstructed by the VN's dialogue box, and pressing "H" to hide the dialogue text also hid the phone screen text. I was still able to read everything okay, but that's a QoL thing that I'd suggest fixing if there was time. 

That... wasn't exactly rapid fire, I suppose, but whatever. Writing!

The writing is good, and I want to make this clear right off the jump in this section. "Stepping past old ballet programs, folded laundry still in a basket, and the occasional knitted stuffed animal, you sit on the edge of their bed." is an excellent line that conveys so much detail about Cygnus without firing a minigun of metaphors at the reader. I did notice that the writing felt more comfortable once the relationship started to sour than it did in the more romantic first flashback. There's a lot of awkward phrasing in that scene that doesn't feel natural.

For example, "You've been really getting into my feelings lately" - I don't quite know what that's supposed to mean. Is that supposed to be "You've been really interested in my love life recently" or "I've been thinking about you a lot recently"? As another example, "I want your name in my mouth, and I want to struggle to say it between my breaths." I kinda feel like this was supposed to be an internal thought rather than actually spoken, but I just... cannot imagine someone actually saying this during sex. I don't really have a problem with the language used when Erin and Cygnus talk about their relationship issues, but the dialogue in that flashback seems way too verbose and literary to feel real. Something to keep in mind if you make a future project that leans more heavily into happy romance.

Last bit on writing before I move on to plot, theme, and character, I question the use of second person for the narrative in this VN. Usually that works best for VNs with a lot of interaction, where the reader is essentially using the protagonist as an avatar, but I don't think that applies here. This story is deeply personal to Erin, and is accordingly Erin's story, not the reader's, so a first-person or limited third-person perspective could have worked better. 

Getting to the meat of the VN, there are two reasons it doesn't quite land for me:

1) The causes for dysfunction in Erin's and Cygnus' relationship feel unbalanced. I think this VN is trying to convey that both partners' mental issues contributed to the relationship's decline, but it feels lopsided. From what we see in the story, Cygnus is consistently trying everything they can to reach Erin, but Erin hardly ever reciprocates. We get one moment where Cygnus appears to cause the problem (sleeping through Erin's day off), but this is immediately cancelled out by Cygnus' expectation that Erin wouldn't be there, which Erin doesn't really have a counter for. 

I think a root problem here might be that we learn much less about Erin in comparison to Cygnus. What factors, if any, make him so afraid of commitment? What was his and Cygnus' friendship like when they were just best friends instead of lovers? What brought them together? Why was Erin able to get past his reservations on that first night but apparently not much after that (besides adrenaline and horny)? What was pushing him away during their relationship? Based on how that first flashback was characterized, it feels like there has to be more than just a busy work schedule and playing a lot of Guilty Gear to create that kind of disconnect. 

Another angle here could be having Cygnus make more "mistakes". I understand that the intent isn't to make the decline of the relationship anyone's fault, but it kind of feels like Erin's right now. Like, instead of having the Cygnus/Kosta hookup be played for comedy like it is now, have that be more of a betrayal. Ultimately, Erin's absence would still play a role in that situation happening, but it would avoid this issue where Erin seems to be the primary cause of the problem and Cygnus is portrayed as a comparative angel. 

2) Erin's catharsis doesn't feel earned. This is the big one. Erin has a line in Cygnus' eulogy that reads: "Cygnus helped me to keep growing and becoming a better version of myself." Uh... did he? 

I think it gets swallowed up in the heavy emotions of individual scenes, but Erin's arc actually reads fairly shallow to me. During the flashbacks before we jump into the Black Mirror brand memory plot device, Erin recognizes that Cygnus, while emotionally needy at times, deeply and unconditionally loved him and that he didn't reciprocate those feelings the way Cygnus needed him to. Once we're done with the memory recordings, Erin is reminded that Cygnus, while emotionally needy at times, deeply and unconditionally loved him even though he didn't reciprocate those feelings the way Cygnus needed him to. 

You could say that Erin's appreciation for Cygnus is strengthened by those visuals, but to me it almost comes off selfish. The resolution to this whole thing is for Erin to open the drawer and wear the pendant to Cygnus' funeral, proud that Cygnus valued him more than anyone else (yes I know he feels bad about that but still). This reads to me like Cygnus' memories are being used more to assuage Erin's guilt than substantively, materially change his feelings regarding Cygnus. 

One potential change you could have made to the ending is having Erin give the pendant to Kosta. This would represent a change in Erin's perspective, from continuing to "possess" Cygnus after their death to giving that memory to someone who was actually there for them in the way they needed someone to be. (Though honestly I agree with Fuze's suggestion that this story would've worked better with Cygnus and Kosta ending up together than Cygnus dead). 

Right, so, that was a lot. And I mean a lot. Might be a new record honestly. But there was still a lot to like here, and I don't want the takeaway to be that this was a bad VN. Just wanted to get my thoughts out there, so take or leave them as you will. 

I really liked how it depicted depression on both sides of the relationship, and I liked how it tricked me into thinking it was going to be a bit like Cerpin Taxt only to subvert that expectation for something much more moving. I also really liked the pacing back and forth in some scenes, I think it worked really well. I think it handled that sudden sharp loss of someone close really well, I know that feeling all too well myself.