The writing is excellent, even if there are some formatting problems. The lack of SFX and music hurt... although, it isn't entirely barren of purpose either. It's like, when I heard this novel's music, it was like I was struggling to remember, to hold onto a song. I loved it without knowing why, eh? I loved even without the accuracy of why i loved... Yeah, the music is monotonous, but it fits really well. Presentation wasn't focused on, because of the very meditative state... it left me wanting.

Overall, I hope to remember this even after I lose my skin.

Outer And Inner Before I Became You You Became Me (colloquially referred to as Mememememyou because I never remember the title) has an interesting core concept of exploring, seemingly, the onset of Alzheimer's for the protagonist through reflections on their experiences with their mother's own dementia as well as a wolf-standin for themselves. The writing makes use of long, flowery prose and a fair bit of repetition I feel is in line with the themes. I do think the actual translation is an edited machine translation though. It's just too perfect grammar wise and containing zero spelling errors, which is not what I'd expect from something the creator says is "a very poor translation". (Note, I do not think the story is AI written. It contains way too much emotional complexity, not to speak of the gimmicks.)

The very, very simple visual presentation also ends up working - we see nothing besides The Forest and the shadow of The Wolf. The music consisting of a 10 note loop however is misstep to me. It's fine for the visuals to rarely change as one's eyes can busy themselves with reading, but the repetitive sound ended up driving me insane. 

There's a loop mechanic here that really fits the theme of dementia, having the same conversation with some variations. Although full disclosure, I got the hidden ending at first, and then ending C five times after which I gave up on getting the rest out of frustration. So I can't say it's perfectly implemented, but it's a good idea.

I was ready to rate this game high. But then I found about the... thing. Which in my opinion was a stupid thing to include, as it severely undermines the topic that from what I can tell is actually well represented by recontextualising way too many parts of the narrative. I'd just ignore it, but with that information I can tell that practically everything about The Story and The Wolf was made to support that aspect first, Alzheimer's allegory second. I don't know why one would want to turn a well-researched and/or first person experiences with Alzheimer's into a SCP creepypasta, but either way, it mostly soured things for me (and I'd normally like SCP creepypastas, it was just weird for this one!)

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. 

I really liked this one. The prose is superb. It's intricate and so pleasing to read. Prose this good is rare among FVNs, let alone jam FVNs. This VN does a good job exploring dementia and the trauma of both the victim and the people close to the victim. There are a lot of interesting topics that are touched upon, especially in the stories Cael tells. I like that there are a lot of ways you can interpret the story. You'll likely have a different experience from someone else who read the story. I think how it presents the stories works well, as folklore works very well. That being said, the presentation is unfortunately a little lacking. Most of the game has one song looping throughout it, and while it's ambient enough not to get grating, a bit more audio variety could have helped. The same goes for the visuals, as it's just a black silhouette on top of a background for most of the game. This works for the themes of the game, but it doesn't really use much of the medium. I think NVL mode would be more appropriate for this VN. Don't get it twisted, though, this is a very wonderful VN that I can't recommend enough.

An odd and surreal piece. Normally, I'm not the biggest fan of abstract writing, but I think it worked this time. I think my favorite parts were all the little anecdotes throughout the story, anchoring it to reality a little bit and preventing it from being excessively poetic mumbo-jumbo. I especially liked the threshold merchant, and the idea that a home without a threshold is a home without travel. Obviously, this story is very much lacking in visuals, but I think the presentation still works well for this kind of story. I also enjoyed all the little programming tricks, such as the randomized quotes between each chapter. I actually noticed that only because I quit the VN a short way into it the first time (just wanted to preview the VN before reading it the next day) and it ended up being completely different the second time I booted up the game. I do kinda wish I had actually read the first run though, but I like that the title keeps changing based on a bunch of different factors I'm not sure about. Gives the story a lot of mystery, which is accentuated by the silhouetted wolf and abstract language. Yet despite the vagueness, the story still stuck with me, which is a sign of good writing and the right decisions on when to not be vague (for example, stating outright that the MC's mother had Alzheimer's). Replaying the game to see the different choices also changed just enough where I could see Cael's personality shift with the choices you made. I'd have liked to see more, but the skip button kept breaking. Probably for the best that my experience was personalized by the choices I made anyways. Well done.

'Outer And Inner Before I Became You, You Became Me' is an existential story about stories. It tries to grapple with the paradox of how important stories can be to preserving memories and teaching lessons, but also how in crafting those stories, the actual people that those stories may be about become distorted and can be lost in the story itself. To craft a story is to file away all the unimportant details that makes a person a person, and crafts them into a character. In doing so, the character is no-longer a person and if that is the case, could a story truly ever capture the memory of what makes a person whole? It presents that people are merely stories crafted by others to identify them, so if there is no one around to tell your story, do you actually exist? Much is the mystery of conscience.

The story actually presented in this visual novel is actually a few layers deep. You have the personal story of the POV main character, a man wracked with grief after losing his mother to Alzheimer's and grappling with the complex emotions of seeing her forget him as a person, thus giving him a little bit of an existential identity crisis. He wanders into the woods where he meets a wolfman. Said wolfman, Cael, is infected by a parasite called FOLKLORE, that exists within the fragments of his mind and is slowly overwriting his thoughts to only be able to tell the story that FOLKLORE is, as if the story itself were a virus strain. I think that the story is actually three stories: the flowers and the bells, the reflective lake, and the threshold seller. Depending on the choices you make and the questions you ask, determine the outcome of the wolf, where you become the new story host, where you let the wolf be consumed by the story, one where you and the wolf share the burden, and I think a secret ending where the story becomes self aware and the parasite stops being infectious (these are my musings, so I might be wrong about the interpretation). I think what the story is trying to go for, is this sort of meta-narrative about stories, and trying to convey to the reader that they are now infected as well with this story.

The presentation is minimal and very much dependent on how susceptible the reader is to 'creepy-pasta'. There's only a few backgrounds and only a silhouette of a wolf sprite, leaving a lot of the visual detail of a visual novel to be left to the text. There is some really cool choices being made in how the menu is minimal and incorporates into the meta-narrative, with menu options like 'listen' and 'leave', very thematically poignant. The shifts from chapter to chapter interspersed with famous quotes from literary works was an interesting touch, trying to indicate which route you were on. Even small details like being unable to skip the 'stories' as they came up, having to click through them, if you've re-read the novel, even a special line if you replay the story to get a different ending, or the title screen change if you find the hidden ending, are fun ways to utilize the medium. That being said, it's a very hard sell in terms of appeal and flair, either on purpose or by lack of effort into it.

As such, a lot of the responsibility falls onto the writing quality itself. It's kind of crazy that this is, I believe, Chinese translated into English, because the prose is very purple and very descriptive. It waxes on about every little detail, while also not really saying anything. Obtuse, would be a way to describe it. It really begs the reader to work at what this story is trying to say, and tackle larger concepts than I think this medium is capable of doing. It almost borders on pretentious. The few times that it gets grounded in reality are nice, otherwise it seems to be about tirades of philosophical concepts that start to lose their impact, the more you realize that there's not really a conclusion that the story is going to be able to reach. It's one of those ambiguous endings, choose your own meaning, type of deals. I don't hate that it does that, and I appreciate the little Easter eggs in the game files for some meta-narrative and backstory, but for as much effort that I put into trying to understand it, left me unsatisfied with the 'prize' at the end.

From a folklore perspective, I get that this was a story about stories, but kind of misses the point of what folklore is. Folklore leans more into a communal and shared story tradition, while this visual novel prefers to focus on how stories are crafted by individuals, in order to 'infect' others with that story. The stories kind of touch on the folklore aspect, with the reflective lake being the most folklore-y of the bunch. I will say this is a strangely creative narrative, and I love the techniques used to make the meta-narrative.

This is a really high concept type of visual novel, and with that comes a lot of risk of it either going over people's heads, or it ending up verbose and exhaustive to read. Unfortunately, as cool as a concept as this seems to be, I don't know if the execution and final product is compelling enough to over come how not invested I was in the characters, outside of my initial curiosity. Funny enough, I wonder if the visual novel is aware of this, as the hidden ending seemed to have the nailed on the head, that one should be interested in the person behind the stories just as much as the story itself. I wanted to feel invested in the characters, but there's hardly anything to latch onto. I understand that its the point, but even so, it would be nice to get some resolution to that. I guess because there are options, it gives the illusion that there's a good path and a bad path, but ultimately, it feels like it's all the same path. That being said, it's really interesting getting a perspective from a Chinese background that I haven't read much from, and I wonder if that's reflective of this author's style of writing, or that's just how Chinese stories feel. 

⭐⭐⭐

I struggled a lot with understanding how I feel about this one. On its face, the writing is excellent and there's a real knowledge on the topics being dealt within the story. And yet, I could not seem to connect with the whole thing.

 While I can still see quality of the writing and the effectiveness of its imagery, the truth is I really struggle with works written this way. This VN presents many lengthy, almost flowery monologues, a style I've read before and always had mixed feelings on. The problem, as I see it, is while the allegories are creative and vivid, their recursive presentation only worked to belabour their point. It came off to me as a distracting level of heavy-handedness that bogged down this already slow-paced tale. 

But I must insist: the imagery is good. An example I can give without reservation is when a character mentions starting to "have to reach out for their own name." Part of why that one stuck with me is the fact that we don't get a prolix analysis from the MC afterwards; the ephemerality of this powerful mental image, not its overbearing presence, was what made it work. 

Audiovisually, there is very little here. The handful of music tracks do contribute to the atmosphere and I've heard an argument in favour of its stillness, but to me, there's definitely an opportunity for more creative use of the V side of this FVN. 

This project didn't have the best shot of grabbing me due to the style it's going for, but I very much stand by my points here. Maybe if you enjoy a purpler prose and don't mind how static it is, you'll enjoy this one. To me, it spent too long gilding the lily. 

 对Tianri，别担心，这个英语翻译不太错了。大多数的时候句子又好懂又好看。虽然我自己不太喜欢这个写法，但是故事很好

This one felt deep and open to many interpretations. For me, it was about existence and the passage of time. Lot of painful truths and lived experiences. There is just so much emotion throughout it all. Presentation/implementation could be improved, as I do feel the single scene and music were stretched too thin? (Like a picture book with only cover art?) Now if only I could read Chinese...