I know where this character design is from. I know. I won't say it but I know. I loved it. I loved knowing. He loved being a bad wolf...

It was a very pleasant reading, a renewal of Red Robbingsman and the Deadly-Dastardly Wolf, but they are not robbins or deadly-dastardly and instead they make baked goods.

The music was great, the little cgs near the end, of baking the pie - so charming! And Rossi, feeling so inadequate and learning to believe in himself, even with heartbreaking loss, it didn't leave much to be desired. Yes, I was well fed.

This one is very cute and wholesome. I really enjoyed this one. So I’ll start with the main negative with the VN: the English translation has a lot of typos, grammar mistakes, and spelling errors, and there’s one line late in the VN that’s completely untranslated. On the one hand, these errors could have been easily fixed if there had been a native English-speaking editor willing to address them, or even if just a simple spell-checker program was used. On the other hand, making an entire game jam VN in two languages within a month is quite impressive and something I probably wouldn’t be able to do even if I were fluent in multiple languages. Plus, I think past the typos, the actual prose is pretty nice and lovely to read, which is overall better than (and probably more impressive) than English prose that has no grammar issues but is very stiff.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the positives of the game, which is everything else, basically. The art is gorgeous and has a nice comfy style to it. It’s just so warm and feels very human-made. The character designs also look great, with each character honing in on a fantasy with a steampunk aesthetic quite nicely. Shout-outs to Rosso, who dons the femboy look with style, and Bonet, who’s very adorable and looks like he’d give great hugs. The cut-in art is very expressive and cute. The characters are also very entertaining as well. Bonet is, of course, the star of the show, but I also liked Rovere a lot. Helps that he’s a cute bear daddy. Rosso is also endearing in his own way, especially by the end. Even the antagonistic character is pretty interesting and works well as a threat to Rosso, even though her personality is very unlikable. The music is also very good, and fits the setting of the VN. The story is simple but effective. It’s a story about dealing with loss and feeling like you’re too inadequate. I really like the message it sends. By the time the story ends, I was actually wanting more. This was really good! The only other kinda issue with the VN, is that it doesn’t relate to folklore that much. I guess Rosso’s grandma and her stories would be some kind of folklore. Would highly recommend anyone looking for a cozy and wholesome read to read this one. Looking forward to whatever you make next!

Dark horse banger of an entry. First of all incredible choice on the music, love to see royalty freak out here. 

Really good and sweet game about loss and recovering from it, and the different ways people feel entitled to the memories of those we have lost. Getting it out of the way, I appreciate the twist on red riding hood, a really clever way to thread that folktale through the story. There's certainly a red riding hood, a wolf who "eats" grandma, a woodsman, etc etc. Don't worry my literary analysis is strong enough. I don't know that I'm strong enough for Bonet though, good heavens, I'm looking disrespectfully. I absolutely love the design and art style. It reminds me a lot of The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince, as well as well as The Cruel King and the Great Hero. that sort of scribbly storybook style. It's gorgeous, and compliments the simple but effective background as well. 

There are a few minor hiccups, the about page crashes the game and has to be closed, and there's one line after Rosso's crashout that is still just fully portugese even when the language is set the english. 

anyway love the bisexual dilf, what a winner

That’s a cute VN.^^ A simple story about grief and honoring the dead loved ones; it’s quite well made. The characters are all quite interesting and distinctive. The writing is alright, but there is a number of mistakes. Notably one sentence is missing an english translation. The folklore theme doesn’t really appear. I guess the granny’s recipes and the story we hear about them is supposed to be that, but I don’t think it really works.

The UI is a treat, and the sprites are all really nice. There’s a nice number of CGs to accompany the scenes that really get me in the story. I’m not a big fan of the way the backgrounds were rendered though; it works alright for some while others look… not great. Not a fan of the sprites just appearing or disappearing without transitions sometimes. The music fit the VN really well and is really nice to listen to.

Overall, it’s really solid. Good job!

Really good. It was a nice and easy read. The central message was pretty blatant and predictable, but the story works well enough for what it is. The characters are very well defined, immediately making an impression upon their introduction. There's a strong and intriguing narrative hook, Bonet's creation and even all the logistics involved. There's some fun experimentation with his range of knowledge. The story then shifts to the other characters, and we get to see the bakery grow. Of course, it's obvious that Rosso is digging himself into a corner, and at some point everything needs to come down. And fall apart it does. It's definitely a relief that the hot dilf bear was there to pick it all up. Ultimately, the ending was again predictable but still sweet. I liked these characters a lot! Though I'd have liked to see more scrutiny into whether Bonet's existence is like, moral and all that. It was the most interesting thing about the beginning, then never really got touched on after that. But I can understand how that would end up being a question with no answers. Regardless, even though this story was kept simple, it's still very sweet. The visuals are impeccable as well, especially the cute CG cut-ins. The writing honestly could have been better but I understand that the native language is Portuguese and thus the translation into English was pretty good, considering. All in all, a very solid entry, good on all levels.

That was, an adorable read, the theme implementation was kind of on the nose, but took me a while to notice, which is a creative take on the theme, took me a while to realize it was about little red riding hood, and I think it was done well for this story.

The presentation was also charming, the backgrounds make me feel somewhat dreary, but it adds to and contrasts with the cartoony look of the characters. Paired with the elegant dialogue box, it points to a particular style that I can't pinpoint, but feels somewhat familiar. Also, the music choice was pretty good for each scene.

The story itself also was amazing. Rosso's motivation to keep the memory alive but cannot perfect the recipes is an interesting perspective on grief, and I just love it. Also, Bonet is very precious and baby and will do everything to protect him from the horrible world. And about the world, it's quite interesting: magic exists, magical prosthetics, and it sounds like a casual thing, or is it? It's just Rosso who's doing them. Which is why I wonder how easily people just accept the massive shadow doggy that suddenly morphed its body to "advise" Rosso's mother. And it kind of sounds ironic that Rosso's assistant is a wolf, when the thing that killed his grandma was also a wolf. Or from what I could gather, he took the wolf and added it to the mixture?

The writing, I cannot know how well it was written in Portuguese, but in English it needs some cleaning up, like capitalizing the "i"s and fixing the spelling of what I only noticed is one word, which was "neede" and then one line wasn't translated at all which was the sentence "Bonet se afastou aos..." and what came after it.

Very cute read with a heartfelt story out of 10. 4, 5, 5, 4, 5.

Rosso taking until this long in his life to conjure a big fluffy wolf best friend is a level of patience I don't think I could ever attain. 

Really though, this was cute, cozy, and pretty effective for its relatively short duration. I'll get more into it below, but I had a good time with this one.

Implementation of Theme:

Reading a couple of the comments below, I see that the "folklore" element may have been a reference to Little Red Riding Hood. While that makes sense now (besides Bonet having consumed the grandmother in an attempt to take her place so to speak, Rosso is literally wearing a red cape and is also literally named Rosso) I did not get that while reading and was struggling to find the connection. I'm giving you full points for folklore here, but I also felt the need to convey that I was kinda dumb I guess. Moving on.

Presentation:

The art and music are absolutely spot-on here, and I got a feeling the latter would be as soon as the gratuitous sax hit on the main menu. The sprites are outstanding - cute and expressive, including for characters that barely even appear. Giulia and Russo's mom are crazy good for characters that only appear in one scene each. Some of the storybook-style CGs were exceptional too - the whole ending pie-making sequence was fantastic. Only minor issue regarding the visuals is that some of the filters on the backgrounds might have made them look a bit more eerie than intended. The grayscale cabin exterior definitely comes to mind - that almost looked like something more fitting for a horror story than a lighthearted tale about baking pastries. 

The weak point in presentation is the numerous proofreading errors, but writing a coherent story in a second language is already really difficult, much less polishing it to make it shiny. There were a few lines I didn't follow, but I didn't have any trouble getting the overall story or tone. Especially for a first attempt, this was gorgeous work.

Story/Writing:

The plot here is pretty straightforward, but thematically this is an interesting look into grief as well as generational trauma (in this case living up to the expectations of your elders). We have a juxtaposition of Russo's mother, who handles both of these things in an unhealthy way (taking her anger out on Russo, losing her connection with her own mother after attempting to kill Russo), and Russo, who struggles initially and even falls into some of the same patterns (like taking his anger out on Bonet), but grows to come to terms with his grandmother's death in a healthy and stable way.

This is all generally pretty effective, though I did have a few critiques:

- The exchange between Rovere and Russo relies on parallels that are maybe a bit too direct. I get that we're going for a fairy tale aesthetic, so maybe that's why the "moral" is so blunt, but having Rovere's experience with losing his wife mirror Russo's experience with his grandmother almost exactly feels a bit convenient and simplistic and I feel like there are other ways you could've gotten to Russo having his realization and catharsis.

- Maybe personal taste, but I felt like Russo's mother was depicted as almost cartoonishly evil ("Your guardian would be the bottom of a cliff if not for her" - Jesus Christ, man) and maybe a little more nuance could have generated a more interesting conflict between her and Russo. Like, instead of the mother just being an irreparably reprehensible attempted child murderer, maybe she's still resentful of Russo, but for more sympathetic reasons that show the two characters are grieving from a similar place but handling it in very different ways.

- Evil dialogue aside, I feel like the mother did kinda have a point about being mad regarding the sacrifice of the last remnants of the grandmother to create Bonet. This is sort of addressed with Russo's angsty breakdown following the initial lemon pie attempts, but then it's more or less waved off by Rovere, who says that memories can exist without a physical representation. While this is true, that also limits the grandmother's legacy to the living memory of Russo, and maybe to a greater extent, Bonet, whereas the grandmother's cookbooks and other writings could continue to exist even after Russo, Rovere, and everyone else in the story was also gone. There are also pieces of worldbuilding that we don't know that could provide additional context for this (e.g., how permanent is Bonet? Since Bonet has all the memories of the cookbooks, could he just recreate them?). I'm not necessarily saying that this story needed to spend time on said worldbuilding, since that might have been too tangential and disrupted the narrative, but I do think that this moral quandary is maybe more complex than the story makes it out to be.

- The story also ended fairly abruptly on kind of a weird line. Giulia being happy the pie will be there soon is a seemingly insignificant note to end on. Maybe Russo looking forward to running the bakery with Bonet, or Russo being glad that Bonet exists, or something like that would have been a better coda.

Creativity:

Tons of creativity on this one, from the high concept all the way down to the details. As expressed above, some things didn't necessarily mesh all the way for me, but I can't fault the effort here at all. This was a really excellent showing that's stuffed with originality, passion, effort, and lemon filling.

I really do wish I could've tried that lemon meringue pie. :(

Final score of 5 loaves of freshly baked banana bread out of 3 cookbooks that taste better than the recipes inside them.

also why is Rovere jorking it with his wooden hand that sounds painful as hell

'Her Old Recipes' is a cozy slice-of-life drama kind of story about using baking to deal with grief with a magical twist. The visual novel is cute, a little bit messy, and bursting with personality. It takes what would normally be a grounded in reality story and adds enough magical elements to make it feel almost fairy tale-ish, which I think is also on purpose for what I think was the main folklore inspiration for this piece.

The story follows a young male witch who creates an amalgamation in the shape of a wolf. This construct was made with the express purpose of being fed some recipes (cause it can learn by eating printed paper), so it can help him run his bakery. Though the slice-of-life day with the witch, the wolf slowly learns with the reader the situation with the witch, how the bakery was owned by his grandmother, how said grandmother has died, and the strain on the witch from his mother and himself is what caused him to make the wolf in the first place. In trying to keep her alive, he's just trying to recreate everything she did but just perfectly, which he's been struggling with. Eventually with the help of a lumberjack friend and the wolf, they work through the witch's grief and start living as the grandmother would've wanted him to continue living. The characters are all really well written, each one feeling distinct from the other. The witch being a sad boy, the wolf being a innocent good boy, the lumberjack being a wise friend and his mother being a complicated and angry woman.

The presentation is so good. Like, the first thing that stands out is just how much style and artistic flair this game has. From the UI, to the way the sprites are drawn, to the character designs themselves, very few noticeable hiccups (the only one would be doing mirroring of the sprites, and thus changing up the asymmetrical details). The music is mood setting. The way that the storytelling style changes from standard visual novel to storybook cgs is adorable and just really good in the immersion category. Even the filtered photos make it feel fantastical and not like it's weirdly out of place. There's an aesthetic language that's is so consistent that it's one of my favorites in the jam so far. Writing wise, it could use a couple more pass through for technical stuff like certain words and tenses. However, structure-wise, I felt like it kept going at a nice pace, revealing details and plot points as they became more important. It does get a little bit soap-opera-y and melodramatic when the familial element comes in, making it feel like there's a bit too much trying to pile on, and leaving a sort of unresolved plot thread with his mother, that I felt could've been explored more, other than trying to just paint her as an antagonistic force that doesn't get addressed again.

The folklore element I think is Little Red Riding Hood, and using that as a structural starting point for the character set up is really cute. Especially the "Big Bad Wolf" eating granny's recipes is just a fun interpretation and twist on the classic tale. I thought the setting and the designs were super creative, and the characters were really endearing. I think Russo (the witch) had a simple character arc, going from sad boy to hopeful boy, thanks to the construct that he made. It's simple, but in a good way, giving the feel good cozy vibes and a bit of overcoming grief narrative plot line that warms the heart.

So surprised that this was a first time entry by the author and artist, cause this is just fantastic. The presentation is extremely polished, the art is cute, and the story is also something that just works extremely well for a game jam like this. Like, good judge of keeping the scope in check. It sets out what it wants to do, and executes it. Do I wish that there was a little bit more of a plot happening and there was a bit more deliberate actions being made, sure. Especially with Bonet (the wolf) being super perfect and helpful, a lot of the conflict ends up being existential. But, I get the feeling that this is the story that wanted to be told, and it was told extremely well. Looking forward to so many more projects you decide to cook up.