Donut Holes is an excellent short FVN that reaches an ephemeral “impeccable simplicity."

This is one is pretty free of fat (which becomes ironic once you read it), making it a tight, focused experience that knows what and how to deliver its beats. It even has choices leading to different outcomes, but nothing so complicated as to distract from its core identity.

There's very little to critique here. Even if the one NSFW scene is a little superfluous, it's fits well enough into the narrative that it's not distracting. 

DH is the rare case where little could have been added or removed to improve it and it's easily one of the best in the MAY WOLF Game Jam.

Apathesis is an ambitious project that aims higher than it could possibly reach.

There's a clear care and admiration for literary works on display here. With references to Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and Le Guin's Omelas, it is clearly aiming to tackle tough and deep subjects.  While there's an interest to make good on those references and inspirations, the transition to VN is far from smooth. Apathesis is wordy and imprecise in an artistic way that doesn't quite fit the format at hand. Non-textual aspects are used in a decent way but they are relegated to play second fiddle to a writing that ends up too big for its own good.

The story and prose fit the project really well, but that comes at a cost to the experience of actually reading it. Moments of meandering over description are recurring and distract from the "emotional-intellectual struggle" that commands the story. The nature of the location and actions presented do benefit from this method of description, but actually sitting to down to read it, one easily gets marred by it.

As for the plot itself it works pretty well. Though there are loops of places, characters and interactions, it's all connected by a gameplay light enough to not take away from the focus, but just deep enough that one should still be paying attention. The pacing at which choices are introduced is a mixed bag and will only make sense once one looks back from the end of the story.

Overall, Apathesis is an overambitious, flawed, intriguing, experimental, and a smidge pretentious project whose parts connect in unusual ways, resulting in a rather excellent big picture worthy of experiencing even if putting it together is undoubtedly a chore.

TUNING OUT offers a case where ambition comes at the detriment of a project. The volume of words and variations is impressive for a Game Jam, but taking in each individual route, it doesn't hit the targets it aims for.

Some technical aspects also leave something to be desired. The UI is a mixed experience of hard to read and broken patterns that harms the reading experience.

Writing and art-wise, though, the project is perfectly serviceable.  Everything carries a good level of competency,  making for a solid foundation of the core aspects of a visual novel. The only caveat here is that the pacing is a smidge too fast and readers aren't allowed get a full glass of the inherent melancholy present in this set up.

Once again, it is impressive that this project has routes and a "relationship score system," but many of the individual parts are uneven enough that the whole image takes a slanted picture. Doing all routes doesn't take long, and it is worth looking into it for what good there is in TUNING OUT.

SPAGHETTI has an interesting idea at its core, but lays dormant in the as it takes form of a very raw project.  No aspect of this one is memorable (sans core premise) and it comes off as something more ambitious than the developer could achieve yet. Its shortness becomes help and hinderance. One one hand it keeps it all tight and in focus, but on the other, there simply is not enough time spent to delve into the feelings and implications here. Once you get past the initial set-up, Sghetti just doesn't have much to offer as a FVN.

This one is definitely top tier. Excellent writing that manages to be funny, deep and engaging, A Rebound from MARS! delivers a quality experience that's fun throughout.

There are a handful of issues with the presentation, however. The choice to make every BG dark and purple works to unite the VNs palette at the cost of making each individual images hard to distinguish. The times when these are relevant are few but it does hinder the experience somewhat.

Even so, each and every other aspect of this project wows. Prose, pacing and dialogue come together the reading experience flow really well. There are a handful of cases of overdescription but those are far apart and don't slow down the story to a large degree.

A Rebound From MARS! is one of the best projects to come out of the MAY WOLF 2024 Visual Novel Jam and its impressive even without that context. Incredibly well-made story paired with a good use of the medium make this easy recommendation and actually a good intro to FVNs as a whole.

I got spaghooned!