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