I was extremely impressed by the 3D graphics and the fact that you could go around and talk to NPCs, the only Jam game I think in which you can do that in 3D. You obviously put a lot of work into this. There were some graphical glitches, the mouse arrow didn't disappear in-game, and dialogue text stuck around very long. Overall though, this was delightful, and I spent a lot of time just hanging out in the village. :)

So, some thoughts! It looks nice, I don't know much about the look for this period, it struck me as a bit odd that the village had such a small stick fence and I wonder if villages wouldn’t have cleared trees a bit further from the walls to create space for farm plots and improve visibility: but we’re on minor quibbles, generally the medieval aesthetic had a reasonable if slightly “generic RPG” feel to it. Music was nicely chosen too. Gameplay was of course quite limited and it would’ve been nice to have a bit of pathing choice or something to make it feels more of a game and put more of the plot into interactions. I found the controls a bit janky and I’d rather have had either the camera solely on keyboard and the mouse free for UI selection or the mouse locked to camera movement and action with keyboard selectors for the dialogue UI, I think. The halfway house was a tad awkward. Also it would've been good to have the text sections at the ends skippable, not because I didn't want to read them but because I read them in about a third of the time it gave me.

Regarding the history: I really like the use of primary sources. Whilst having the full burning of the village is a fair reading of this period especially for Ryazan which absolutely did suffer heavily, I thought maybe the nuance you had in some of the surrounding text could’ve worked itself into the game a bit more - there's a tendency to just portray Mongol attacks as unfocused killing, whereas things like the slaughter at Ryazan were probably quite purposeful in their horrors in order to show other cities and rulers the consequence of failing to surrender. Rural villages, on the other hand, were probably torched rather more rarely (despite what things like the Galician chronicle tend to say): destruction of supplies, fleeing before an attack, enslavement, etc were all serious threats and I think in some ways offer more story potential than the “everyone’s dead, Dmitri” approach, so for a longer game a bit more of that angle for the player might be a more interesting route. It’s also worth noting that western sources were often really quite explicit in portraying the Mongols as simple unstoppable monsters because for people who wanted a more united and ordered Christian world, talking up a bit terrifying threat to that made a lot of sense. I did like your inclusion of a nod to the connectivity of the Pax Mongolica, and generally I like the approach of having quite an ordinary, human viewpoint on some of the very harrowing realities of the worse bits of medieval history. Anyway, I gave it five stars because I thought this was a pretty fair crack at the history especially given the constraints of game jam level time allowances (and where I make critiques here, I’m thinking about them as a professional historian of a nearby region & period so I don’t want to be unfair in the expectations I’m setting!)

I was, on that note, interested that you used Hungarian/Western sources rather than translations of Russian ones like the Hypatian codex/Galician-Volhynian Chronicle. Was there a reason for that choice?