Man, I don't know what to do with this one. Maybe this is one that's too smart for me, but this felt just a bit too muddled to truly land as I think it was intended to. I'll try to break down my thoughts the best I can.
Presentation/Writing:
Yeah, let's get this stuff out of the way early. Some other people didn't have as much of an issue with the presentation, but I thought this was a weak point for the VN. I know this is a very meditative, contemplative piece where there's not a lot of action or motion going on, but this is still ostensibly a visual novel, and the only visuals we have are a couple of static backgrounds that are basically just changes in brightness and one silhouetted, completely static sprite. The background music remains the same throughout the VN as well, even playing behind the rain SFX, which is the only other audio outside the main menu. Granted, it's a personal quirk, but highly repetitive sounds bother me, and since the one backing track was just a short, endlessly repeating sequence, I had to turn the music off to be able to focus. As others have pointed out, there were missed opportunities for other SFX as well - considering how prominent the bell is, having a ringing effect would have been very welcome.
What really kills me about the audio/visual component is that the "Will You Remember Me?" piece absolutely nailed the music and even included a visual effect that was really effective. This is by far the best presentation in the VN, and I feel like 80% of the people who play this won't even see it. I almost didn't until I forced myself to come back and find all the endings, and even then I don't know if I would have been able to if passiv_boi's and Fuze's comments didn't drop some hints about what those endings entailed so I could tailor my choices accordingly. Like, just coming into this blind, if you don't know how the endings are determined, there are thousands of possible combinations of answers you could choose for the branching paths, so it's kind of intimidating to figure out when you don't know what you're looking for. I'm glad I did go back, because that note was quite touching, but a little more guidance would have been appreciated.
Writing I thought was pretty high quality here, especially considering this was translated from Chinese. Like, I don't think I saw a single typo in here (maybe some weird phrasing early on though) and in this short of a timeframe that is seriously impressive. Mechanically, as others have pointed out, there were some structural choices that could have been used more sparingly, like the "not [x]. not [y]. just [z]" construction. I pointed this out in another review as well, but that specific construction comes up a lot in AI-generated prose and it's difficult to unsee. I'm not accusing you of using AI, but that's just another reason to try to keep your syntax varied.
Implementation of Theme:
I mean, it's there, kinda...? What we have here is sort of an inspection of the concept of telling stories itself being the story, like less the actual folklore and more of the conveyance of folklore. This may be stretching the premise a bit (and naming the virus "FOLKLORE" is a bit on the nose...) but I can see the idea. In a way it's even a rejection of folklore considering the "true" ending questions the value of a story that doesn't remember where it originated, or its human component more broadly. It gets a little messy with the dementia parallel though, and I feel like the closer we get to the "true" ending the muddier that throughline gets.
Story/Creativity:
Yeah so let's talk about that dementia throughline. Let me start out here by saying that, as someone who has unfortunately had to see Alzheimer's play out in real time on multiple occasions, you get it. Lines like "love that had outlasted accuracy" felt particularly poignant, and it's hard to convey the emotions of caring for someone who has long since stopped being the person you knew in recognizable form.
On first read, I thought the story was entirely a metaphor for this phenomenon - the MC, or the player, was falling into dementia, just like their mother, and the wolf was a reflection of their self. The "story" was emblematic of their failing mind, with the MC's possible responses to it representing acceptance of their condition without question, denial of the inevitable, or passively clinging to what they could, and regardless of how they approached it, eventually they would cease to be themselves and only continue to exist as part of stories others told about them.
And then I checked the game files and saw that this was actually about an SCP mind virus.
I... don't know how I feel about this. I mean, sure, obviously those parallels are still intended with the loss of the self to the Story mirroring the loss of the self to the disease, but there's no indication of the sci-fi component within the text itself, and you're really relying on people snooping through the game files to get that (though yes, you are admittedly going to get more of those people through a game jam where a higher number of readers than usual are people already familiar with sifting through Renpy files). The hidden ending also doesn't really have an explanation without knowing what the Story is, so even if a reader lucks out and gets it, they'll be lost unless they've read that one text document.
I think this VN might have been just a bit too ambitious in what it was trying to accomplish. The pseudo-SCP angle kind of limits the effectiveness of the meditation on dementia and the persistence of memories in others rather than the self, and I feel like it's just not developed enough in the text to really stand on its own. It's a creative idea - this whole VN is. The way the UI is designed as a metanarrative in itself is testament to that. I just think this might have been a bit cleaner if you had dropped the mind virus thing and just left the wolf not fully explained and open to interpretation. I think that would have suited the highly philosophical approach taken by much of the text rather than making the Story like... adversarial, for lack of a better term.
I didn't dislike this (okay I did dislike the audio) and I don't think you should be disappointed in what you were able to produce for the jam; it's still impressive that you managed to put this out in the time you did, especially in translation. I just wish it was a bit more cohesive, and maybe a bit more user-friendly to get all the endings and plot out of it.
Final score of 9 remakes out of 7 adaptations.