This was nice. Yep, no choices, just going through it, but for lazy mood I had it was perfect. Overall prety good MC, others characters good too (for the kind of story it is), I liked those kids, they were pretty good and their plushie drama incredibly funny. Ended kinda prematurely for my taste, but everythig must end... And BIG thank you to devs for that Utena cameo (?!? whats right word for this), it brought back good memories...
Thanks for the kind words! The plushie drama was actually based on a very similar game that I would play with my sister when we were little - we never quite got to the same point of Court Intrigue that Aster and Luca achieved, but I did have around two dozen stuffed animals, all with names and distinct personalities and voices, who would go on interconnected adventures. We even at one point wrote down on an actual piece of loose-leaf paper a bill of rights for the stuffed animal community. And yes, Revolutionary Girl Utena is one of my favorite anime of all time and also felt like a pretty appropriate pull to drive a scene about two close friends taking their relationship to the next level.
As for the ending, I also think it comes to a halt rather abruptly. At the time I was just ready to be done with it, as I wanted to get started on what would become our
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and the total wordcount had just crossed that of
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. The nature of the story, which was in a lot of ways a kind of
Seinfeld-ian "story about nothing", didn't really lend itself well to a neat & tidy ending structure. I had considered injecting some kind of drama into the final chapter to give things a sense of stakes, such as having Rufus (Jackie's wayward husband) show back up and start making trouble/hitting Jackie up for money/threatening to expose her as a sex worker/whatever, but ultimately discarded that idea because it would have compromised the comfortable/relaxed vibe of the rest of the story (and because that's literally the plot of the second season of terrible sex-work-centric Jennifer-Love-Hewitt-driven dramedy
The Client List). I think if I'd had more time and energy I would have written another 5-10k words' worth of denouement, possibly in the form of short scenes expanding on the seven SFW splash screens that appear at the very end (the ones with Jackie & Rose discussing art, Shruthi playing with Aster, and so on). But then, it wouldn't be video games if there weren't at least a few things for me to look at and think "mm, I could have done better..."
