As much as I enjoyed this, this project's a bit rough around the edges.

It's a bit rushed. You don't like to linger in a scene, and this kind of narrative I think could stand to stand around a bit longer to make the build-up to the ending more satisfying.  Give us time to be like the mushrooms, and set roots and then have them lifted in an untimely fashion.

Our mushroom queen could have stood to be a lot more mushroom-y too.

While I enjoy the idiosyncrasies of your narrative voice, I think they occluded some of the character development, expressing items that we don't quite get to see on the character.

I did quite enjoy your usage of the rain, the overall concept (mushroom colony queen corpse takeover? We stan, of course), your choice in music, but the pacing and structure I think were a bit too rough to let your idea fully shine.

I'm excited for whatever you do further nonetheless.

This was incredibly cute. Mainly due to Aubrie being so damn adorable, both thanks to the art (all those character poses) and because of their bouncing personality!

This another May Wolf entry where a choice was made to employ no narration whatsoever, everything is communicated through dialogue and visuals alone. I think this works really well in the mall scene (which is the main and biggest chunk of the VN). I really loved the whole section.

I do think the beginning and end suffer a bit though. The beginning is pretty confusing and in general the pacing in the beginning and ending scenes feel too fast because there is nothing in between dialogue lines. But overall I quite enjoyed the story.

I give Ugolino points for telling a unique story (werewolf searching for brother) amongst a sea of romance-forward May Wolfs. I generally stayed interested in the plot, and I liked how Build 1 ended.

This review's critique mainly comes from two elements:
- I feel like the introduction of the pup kink towards the end felt jarring/dyssynchronous with the tone of this first build. I'm not saying it couldn't be incorporated into the story, but it's not cohesive.

-I feel like a few graphical elements of the demo, particularly the storage area, pulled me out of the Italian setting (e.g. the English place name signs, and the Amazon boxes in the pile of trash). This is very much a nitpick, but it's an element I would appreciate being revised if this story continues beyond a May Wolf Game jam version. 

All in all, Ugolino is an intriguing proof of concept that I would like to see turned into something more.  

The obvious out of the way: it's hard to say anything conclusive about a straightforward prologue for a larger story. What's there certainly feels appropriately prologue-ish, with the pace never slowing down from the effective in media res opening and the world remaining sparsely enough sketched despite the numerous pieces of lore & backstory. If there's something that feels extraneous at this point, it may be establishing the antagonist(s) as individual characters; the conflict would feel clear even if it was just Mikhail versus a bunch of nameless troops, and the main baddie being around doesn't really pay off yet.

As for the prose, it's generally pleasant to read – good variation in sentence structure, the flowery similes mostly work – but not without errors. Most notably, the tense changes all the time, and there are plenty of punctuation and grammar mistakes as well. Though the clarity of what's happening in the story is only threatened near the abstract ending, I think some editing would improve things a lot; many lines lose their impact due to wonky grammar.

Visually, the only real weak point is the lack of shading making the sprites look more cartoony than what would feel right, given the tone and genre. The sound design is good, though, even if the magic SFX feels maybe kind of... digital, for a lack of better word? Like computer sound effects? There just isn't that much physicality to it, which clashes with what the story is depicting. All in all, an unpolished but functional start.

I think this is an example of the whole being less than the sum of its parts.

First of all, in terms of visuals, it's hard not to think this went through some kind of troubled development. The artstyle changes abruptly after the first couple of minutes. I'm usually not one to complain for contrasting artstyles in FVN, I think that is part of the charm.

In this case specifically, however, I thought the art change was to the work's detriment, for two reasons:

- First, the way the art is used changes dramatically. In the first couple of minutes you get spoiled with a million CGs per second (with fanciful transitions too). Then, for most of the story, the VN becomes a classic case of "sprites + edited pictures for backgrounds".

- Secondly, while I enjoy both renditions of Warren's character, my mind cannot process them as the same character. It's not just that the artstyle is wildly different (I would be ok with that), it's that what the art is trying to communicate does not align at all: Warren shifts from being hot steaming buff wolfman, to being adorably cute puppy dogman. Both the artists did a fine job, but a coherent art direction was missing.

Also, I can't help but feel the story is trying to setup the tower as this beautifully whimsical place with that establishing shot, but then it doesn't really lives up to it in the rest of the story. With the exception of all the teleporting around, the tower after the establishing shot feels just like an old fashioned well furnished castle.

As far as the writing goes, the writing is competent but it did leave me unsatisfied in a couple of aspects. First of all, this VN suffers from a classic case of writing with some nice illustrations on top: IMHO I never takes the step of using the VN medium to its advantage. You could mostly remove all the visual elements, and this would read the same, the visuals feel superfluous.

Secondly, I think the writing could afford to be more daring. It seems like at every turn the safest choice was picked. For example, how do we establish the premise? Opening exposition dump. That, and a lot of description of furniture. With how simple the story in the end is, I think it could have been presented in a more interesting fashion.

Like I said, I think all team members did a fine job on their own, but possibly because of time constraints and trouble development the different parts didn't really enhance each other.