'Rain of Feathers' is the saga of a friends-to-lovers story set in magical medieval furry times. From a tradition that started between he friendship between two kingdoms, the birds and the wolves, a new friendship blossoms into something more. This has got a crazy emotional resonance that's really good about pacing this romance story as a slow-burn, who's only fault is that it's too slow-burn for it's own good and it ends up not being finished!

The story starts with innocent beginnings as two children meet and become friends at the yearly festival that brings the bird people and the wolf people together for a festival called the rain of feathers. Really cute tradition about how birds drop feathers, wolves pick on up, and then the bird see who picked one up and then they spend the festival together forging a friendship. Time skip to when the two are teenagers, and they're still deepening their friendship, and honing their magical and physical skills to become adventurers when they're of age. Crow boy, Roberto, is suddenly hit with the hormones and is like "Oh no, I'm attracted to my best wolf friend, Jacob." Course, as he doesn't want to compromise his friendship, he keeps it hidden. Time skip to when they're adults and just about adventuring age, they spend time together exploring the wilderness, finding hidden ruins, and getting unusually close as Roberto pervs on his friend and becomes a voyeur (so hot). Those ruins they found though, something is related to that legend that they might've uncovered, wonder what it is, since it just finished! It's a really good slow-burn of a friends-to-lovers story, I love the dynamic of the fighter-outgoing-jock wolf and the wizard-reserved-nerd crow, and their innocent and pure friendship that then slowly morphs into something more lustful and perverse. Love the tension of the yearning of wanting to become more but not to risk their friendship.

The presentation is also really nice. I love the emphasis on the cg of teen Jacob with the moon smiling, such a great shot. And there's a lot of feeling and concept work put into this to really try to convey the story you want to tell. Like, yes a lot of the backgrounds are sketches and rough around the edges, but there's also a lot of surprisingly polished pieces here. You've got the introduction of the folklore story being striking, the sprite work of these boys as they grew up, into very handsome men, and then of course the eye candy of Jacob in the waterfall. I will say there's always improvement for adding polish, like title screens, but I think time limit got you ya, considering the ambition of BGs you wanted to put in this. Audio work was also quite well done, with lots of fun sound effects to emphasis on magic spells or weapon hits. It's cute whenever a sprite flies upward to show the birds flying away. The writing could definitely use a pass or two with some edits. The bones are there, it just needs refinement. Making sure that certain sentences read well, maybe fleshing out some more details in certain areas while cutting down on excessive details in other areas.

The folklore theme is also really strong in this one, coming up with a custom one for this world. Sure, it's a bit more historical in context, especially since magic is real, but I think it works for setting up the theme of this story, which is that love can bridge even across races. There were a few moments where the text and dialog gets a little bit anachronistic, using surprisingly modern vocabulary for a fantasy setting, which can bring the reader out. I appreciate the gay-positivity talk Roberto had with his mom, though I think that could use a bit of tweaking, either to better re-enforce Roberto's reluctance to reveal his feeling for Jacob, or to better re-enforce how the world setting views such an unusual relationship pairing. Mom is okay with it, but is this normal society wise? Is there more at stake if Roberto reveals his sexuality than just losing his friend? I thought the concept of the tale was really creative, even if it then seemed to lead into a very standard love/adventure story setting.

I'm really glad to see Kemonito Kusuri use this jam to hone in on their writing and storytelling skills. Something that I notice is that there's always good bones to the stories, but either due to feature creep, too big a scope, or time management issues the visual novels end up with neat concepts and engaging moments, only to be cut short or feel too cumbersome to get to those good bits. I know in previous entries there were attempts at a game-elements, I'm glad the story didn't feel the need to add something in for game-play's sake. Where I feel that you should focus in on for your projects is to leave time to edit, figuring out the heart of your story and making sure the bits that you want to keep in are supporting that. I want to backseat so bad telling you what I think it is, but I also know that this is your story and you have a specific vision to what you wanted this story to be. I'm a sucker for young and first time love, keeping it chaste but also real vulnerability, and I thought that you nailed that feeling on the head.

Alright, so this is pretty clearly taking a step back from your normal jam fare (at least judging by last year's May Wolf and Novembuck) of gameplay-heavy concepts and deciding to focus your efforts on a more in-depth story in the form of a "traditional" VN. I think this is totally fine - while I always found your ideas wildly creative, it seemed like you also never really had the time to pull them off in time for the jam, so doing something a bit technically simpler isn't a bad idea.

With that said, what you had in mind was still apparently a bit too ambitious for the jam since this is only the prologue of the story, with the demo ending as soon as we get our first traces of what is presumably the primary conflict. The thing is, I think you could've actually gotten a lot further along in the story in this timeframe than you did if you just focused the script more. To that end, I'm going to skip around a bit here and first dive into:

Story:

So let's start by taking a look at our leads and recapping what we actually learn about them in each of the opening scenes.

1) When they meet as children, Jacob is brash, impulsive, and outgoing, while Roberto is cautious, reserved, and methodical. Despite their differences, they become fast friends.

2) When they're teenagers, we see that Jacob is brash and impulsive, while Roberto is cautious and reserved. Despite their differences, they're still friends. Also Roberto might be gay. (side note here, but the way Roberto reports on his feelings to his mom felt... weird? Like they're supposed to be teenagers here, and kids are familiar with crushes and "like liking" someone way earlier than that. This exchange probably would have been more effective if Roberto understood what that feeling was and directly brought it up to his mom in the context of "I think I might have feelings for another guy" - she can still be supportive there and it would feel more natural)

3) When they're on their first adventure, we see that Jacob is brash and impulsive and Roberto is cautious and reserved. Also Roberto is definitely gay and very horny.

Right now, the leads' personalities aren't very deep, and because they're not very deep, we're learning the same information about them every time we see them. Their personalities still being a bit nebulous is fine for an intro, but I really wonder here if we needed all the flashbacks to them as kids and teens. Instead, we could just jump into the story while they're already on their first adventure and convey their backstory and relationship through conversation. You could still have the "mom I think I'm gay" scene, but just do it after their excursion to the mausoleum. By being more efficient with your storytelling, you get to the central conflict (presumably figuring out what the notes are about and avoiding people who don't want the protagonists to do that) much faster and the story in turn can feel more engaging and less disjointed. 

I think the backstory scenes are reflective of a broader tendency to overexplain details. There was a particular line that really stood out to me when Jacob states verbatim: "We have done some of the basics of adventuring." Like, this just made me stop, pause, and really consider that we were essentially watching a tutorial mission. Having the initial excursion start low stakes is totally fine - but the focus of the sequence should be finding the mausoleum and its contents. We don't really need a lot of detail on chopping wood, pitching the tent, or cooking food. Even though the boar scene had some kineticism and intense music, I never actually felt any tension since (despite how super dangerous real life boars are) I didn't think for a second that anything bad was actually going to happen to the characters. Maybe this wouldn't have stood out as much if the story leading up to that point was paced better, and even could be useful for establishing how well the leads work together if we start at this general point in the timeline, but as is I don't think it adds much to the narrative.

Implementation of Theme:

Yeah, there's definitely something here, and we waste no time getting the folklore you've established out through the intro story. That folklore will presumably have an integral part in the narrative going forward (like through Adarna and Juan being gay for each other and showing the current protagonists that you can have a gay interracial relationship after all) so I think we're covered here. There are some things that didn't make total sense about the legend itself, but I'll hold those questions for now since they could be explained as part of the story going forward (skimming the script I did see there was an alternate version of the legend from the wolves' perspective, for example).

Presentation/Writing:

Starting with the good, I think the art looks really solid here. Ideally there would be more expressions for the sprites, but I understand that's difficult to pull of in a jam, especially when you're a one-wolf army. The CGs are well done though, and I think the sketchy style of the BGs/CGs used for the intro recounting of the legend suit the oral tradition vibe really well. There's also some creative sprite manipulation to convey movement - it's not the most ostentatious example, but I really like the detail of the birds lowering before they take off.

Writing here was mostly decent, though there were still some proofreading errors and awkward phrasing. Just to provide one example, Jacob "exhales complainingly" - maybe "sighs dramatically"? "groans and wipes his brow"? There are these moments here and there, but I think you've still dramatically improved in your clarity, at least since Afterparty. Your writing definitely continues to improve, but an editor would do wonders for you if you can snag one.

As a final note on the writing, I feel like this story might have been better served by switching the perspective to first person, from Roberto's point of view. For most of the story, we're only getting his internal thoughts anyway, so having him also be the narrator might make it easier to immediately recognize what's just a thought and what's actual dialogue without relying solely on the presence or absence of quotation marks. For the only current scene that's not from Roberto's perspective, you could just shift things around so Roberto and Jacob go see Tony together or something. 

Creativity:

There's definitely some creativity in the worldbuilding you've created for this universe, including its politics and legends, though unfortunately we only get a few glimpses into this in the current build. In the prologue, this mostly takes a backseat to the relationship tension between Roberto and Jacob, but I have to echo Gatr's sentiment below that the way this is currently handled isn't super interesting on its own. "Uh oh I like my friend but I don't know if he likes me back" just feels very basic for a May Wolf plot, and I spent much of this VN really hoping that there was going to be an A plot to provide more of a hook. We did get there, or at least somewhere close, but then the demo ended. 

So, ultimately, I think we have a good start, but I would definitely like to see where this goes with a little tuning up outside the jam pressure.

I'll rate this 4 conveniently placed waterfalls out of 15 rainbow feathers that were actually gay all along.

There's a groundwork for a pretty good story here, but unfortunately since it's only the prologue that's out, there isn't much of a plot yet. I liked the beginning with Adarna's tale and the wolf prince, and I can kinda see where the story is going. It's just that I would have liked to see a bit more of a metaphorical representation of the folklore told through the characters. But the only similarities as far as I can tell is that the wolf and crow are gay for each other. And that's... pretty much what the whole story is. It's nonstop gay panic, with some snippets of an interesting historic subplot. Basically, every single interaction between the crow and the wolf can be boiled down to "we're friends but omg he's so hot but he doesn't know and i can never tell him". Maybe it's a tad unfair but at this point I'm getting tired of the gay panic trope, and I was looking for something else to happen, some more character depth, more of a narrative hook I guess? To be fair, this is only the prologue so there's plenty of time for the story to develop in a more interesting direction, but for now, meh. At least I can appreciate the handmade visuals, especially in the beginning. The sprites are also cute enough, though they could use more expressions (and actual feet, since the sprites fly up quite often and it's weird seeing their footless sprites jump around).

I liked this game a lot! I just wished there was more of it

I don't want to repeat a lot of the same things as passiv_boi did, but I had a lot of the same feelings about the game. I liked the premise, and I thought the game started to pick up after the adventure started, but I agree that the game's pacing was a little shaky in the first few scenes. The amount of art and writing put into this game is incredible for only one month of development time, but the amount of WIP visuals is a little staggering.

Implementation of Theme: 

The folklore exposition at the beginning of the game is a bit much, but it does a good job at setting up the story. Even though the game is not finished, I can clearly see how the folklore in the introduction draws parallels to the characters in the story's present day. I think this is what you did best, although it may have been better to stagger some details of the story, in my opinion. It was a lot of information to immediately receive, all at once.

Story: 

The reason the rating for this is low, even though I liked the story, is simply because it isn't done. The scene where Jacob presents the writings he found and is told to keep it a secret is my favorite part of the story so far, but it is also right before the game is cut off for the jam version.

Presentation: 

Like I said earlier, there are a LOT of WIP CGs and BGs. Obviously, it's impossible to draw everything in a month, and the amount of art you were able to get out is amazing. But it does take you out of the game somewhat when the main two drawn BGs are in-progress sketches.

Writing:

I don't have very much to say here, except that the writing had some minor grammar issues and syntax errors. Nothing a proof reader or two couldn't fix. I also personally felt like it was hard to determine who the perspective of the game was meant to follow at times, and what was an internal thought compared to what was said out loud. On top of that, I think there were a few instances where dialogue was attributed to the wrong person (If I recall correctly, there was a line from Mama tagged as from Jacob).

Creativity:

The creativity was showed off very well in the beginning and the end of the game (the folklore section and the ruins scene). It makes me want to know more about the world's history, so I would say you did a good job at this as well! There were parts of the worldbuilding that went completely unexplained (like the magic system and the academies) but I don't think they need to be exposited on endlessly if they aren't super important to the plot.

Overall, I liked this game! Keep up the good work, and I hope to see what comes of this story if it is some day completed! :)

Edit: I tried doing the drop-down menu that the other person did but it did NOT work so I removed it LMFAO