Played version [v0.5.01]
A benchmark in quality. The level of care in creating this is crazy. The art is amazing, and characters have life! Be it in the scenes or when youre just talking to them. The animation and art is of high quality (comes with shading, nauncy of skin tone, and engaging backdrops). Avoids saturation of characters without content - the characters that are there have a story and the writing tells it well. Thus, brings you more into the world they are creating and leads to a greater degree of engagement.
There are many reviews in this thread detailing how great this game is from a technical and artistic level - with good reason. But what should be noted is the creation of the game itself. The first version was released around April of 2020. As we all know, staying indoors and traveling only when strictly necessary was key. During that time, many of us thought, "hey I should learn how to do this" or "I'm going to finally start doing XYZ". Well a team did just that. I don't know if the idea for WAL came about before everything or after, I just know they sought to do something with their time that they wanted to do and followed through.
Now we're here with one of the best games on the site. The writing is fantastic. Its funny and actually makes you care about the characters you talk to, which I think greatly adds to the nature of the game since you are more invested. The amount of time it takes to make such great/detailed art cannot be understated - who knows how long and tedious it must be to get a character's face or piece of clothing to look just so. Actually, we do! The development team has consistently kept in contact with its community members about how the update is moving along and behind-the-scenes of how the game is being developed! Also, they encourage community engagement with polls on what character(s) should be focused on in the next update and so on. Not to mention, the creators seem like nice people.
TLDR: The combination of community engagement, great care behind the game, and consistently great updates has made one of the best games on the site and a benchmark of how good a game can be. Likeable characters, a caring and smart protagonist, terrific dialogue, and S tier scenes with multiple angles/moving parts come together to make a terrific experience.