First of all, congratulations on making the VN! I can see you put a lot of effort into it and they are amazing, from the custom sprites, GUI, music, all of 'em. I had to play the game on my own outside of the stream to form an opinion. I do think the overall game is great, so I'll be focusing on some things that I think can be improved, so here we go...

SPOILERS ALERT

You have an interesting premise here. Combined with the game title, you grabbed the readers' interest from the get-go. We would instinctively be questioning "ok what's up with this town?" Unfortunately, I think you didn't lean on it hard enough, and that's probably why some people think the shift to the second half of the story is a bit jarring. There's a potential to dig at it a bit further, and I think this is the "missing link" (?). When Walt said something about his friends, Asher could probably tell a bit more about the town's myth or other oddities. That would ease up the shift more toward the mystery part and make the relationship more dynamic. I'm fairly neutral about the voices, but I can see why it's a bit random for some people.

Lastly, about the design of the route split. From reading your notes, apparently, it's kinda spur of the moment decision (?). While I wholeheartedly enjoy the content of all three routes, the design of how a player can access a route is... not so much. I assume you wanted each of those three different paths to tell different sides of the story, so the readers can get the whole picture only by playing through all of them? (I love that system rather than route split that only gives minor flavor text differences or just the ending without affecting the big picture). If that's the plan, I think you should make the route split not very vaguely specific and have some degree of tolerance. In your case, the good ending can only be accessed through an exact series of choices. It won't be too much of an issue if the players can directly see the implication of each choice, but one of the branches used here is Walt's question to Asher whether they had sex the night before or not. From a reader's perspective, the "choices with weight" were the "Yes" or "No", which is very natural to think of. Instead, the "correct" choice here to get into the good ending is to pick the unsure/neutral one. You have 5 branches that determine the ending, and the reader has to make exactly 5 correct choices to get the good ending (and all 5 wrongs for the bad end). This will likely cause some readers to miss the ending, and they might spend too much time figuring things out without the help of your guide. I personally believe if you have to rely on a guide to access a route, especially not a "super secret" route, then something is wrong with the design. I know it's a bunch of rambles, but I hope you get what I'm saying here. One solution that could help this is to make the one choice weighs more than the other, and give some tolerance when evaluating them to decide which branch the readers end up in.

All these things aside, I thoroughly enjoyed the game. I could see the effort and passion poured into it and I think you've done an amazing job. I'll be looking forward to your next project! ^^

Right off the bat, love the expressions and the GUI design. I accidentally went into this without reading the content warning on the game page, which differs from the warning at the beginning of the game, my mistake! Made the events even more surprising. I went into this way more blindly than intended. I will also note that the in-game warning calls the game “Silver Bullets” instead of “Silverstone.”

I made one “slip up” and got the neutral ending first. Didn’t want to beat around the bush when I told Walt he’d have to stay. I did think Walt reacted a bit strongly and brushed it off until the end. Sadly, I ruined the panic attack transition by rolling Back/Forward at just the right time but I still appreciate it being in the game. I think the best silent moment was right before this as well.

As I progressed in my first playthrough I darted between possibilities of what was going on: “Another panic attack? Something supernatural? Walt coming to our rescue? Uh oh.” I wasn’t sure if I was going to replay it again, but after calming down I’m glad I did. Seeing the stark differences between all the routes was illustrative of how much influence the Silver Bullet legend has, to a volatile degree. Looking forward to more!

I'll premise this by saying that I appreciated Silverstone for taking risks and making me think about what it was about: my impressions over it have changed a lot as I read the story and explore all the routes. What story the VN is trying to tell is not immediately apparent. In fact, even after finishing the VN for the first time (I got the "good" ending first) I was still left a bit befuddled. It was not until playing the other endings that I got to appreciate the overarching story the VN was trying to tell. The execution is far from perfect, but I praise it for being daring.

SPOILERS to follow.

On the writing and presentation side, the art had a consistent style to it and the prose was pretty good taken on a sentence by sentence level. I do have to say that the biggest shortcoming for me was a general mishmash when looking at the larger picture. On the writing side, there were some jarring shifts from flowery to very simplistic prose, especially when it comes to dialogue. The narration, that drops refined words at you like "fugue" or interesting turns of phrase like food "residing" in the fridge, is awkwardly juxtaposed with a main character who talks mostly on the level of "Aurgh, I had a fucking hangover". The dialogue in general is a very strange beast, characters will state absolute banal things and the narration/other character has a habit of overreacting to what was just said, which left me plenty confused. (This is not helped by the characters having somewhat confused attitudes throughout, especially when you take player choices into account. Walt will shift from being love dovey with you to being frigid and rude based on random minor choices like whether you offered him your breakfast or not).

My other main criticism is that, considering the basic premise is that of two characters developing a very close connection in the span of a single day... Not a whole lot happens during that one day. Except for the MC sharing a very intimate piece of personal information, everything else is just mundane busywork and casual conversations. I feel like more time would have been better spent actually depicting the characters establishing some sort of connection outside of that one scene.

Now for the part I enjoyed the most: like I said, I love stories that force me to think and that force me to reconsider how you viewed certain things based on the unfolding of new information.

My impressions after getting the "good ending" was basically "Ok, this was a cute and harmless little tale about a character with some personal baggage opening up and finding the courage to step out of his comfort zone. I guess it was ok, even though I'm not sure what that post-credit ending scene really adds to anything."

Then, as I was playing the "worst ending" and seeing how wildly the ending was changing, I had a moment where I went "Oh, the story is trying to depict how the ultimate result is the same (death), the only thing we can really change is what preceeds that point. I love that!"

But then after the identity of the assailant was revealed in the two bad endings, I guess I had to reconsider my interpretation once more: the story was really trying to be a horror all along. I think it was a nice reveal, and it was nice how the same final sentence about the Silver Bullets changes meaning depending on the context and makes you realize what's really going on. (Though ngl, I would have prefered the suble message about being daring because death is coming for us all, over "love me or I'm gonna fuck you up real bad" lol)

So, while I don't think all creative choices worked, if you take this as a horror story that was simply holding its cards close to its chest, I think it was a very interesting read, and the kind of VN that would spark discussion. I'm probably going to be more eager to discuss this entry in the bookclub than most others that I'm going to enjoy/not enjoy.

I really liked your wolf sprite!  The large expressive eyes, and the fact that there was more than one perspective.  I really enjoyed the expressions on the scene with the side profile.

The bad ending seemed a little out of nowhere for me, but there were several clues that something wasn't right the entire time.  Was the lack of music at times to make it a feel a bit foreboding?

I did enjoy your writing style quite a lot!  I would love to see what you can make without time or theme constraints in the future!

Spoilers follow. Reader beware.

Theme: I don't know if I saw it.... barring the good ending death of his heart being too large.

Story: It felt like a forced romance, but that diegetically makes sense because the silver bullet is real and supernatural evidently. I got only the good and bad endings, and didn't try for the third. The dying seems kind of out of pocket for the narrative, especially the canibalismish ending unless the explanation is supposed to be that the silver bullet is so potent, but then why is he more willing to go to killing rather than... compromising on his values a little? My man gets upset if you don't love the same books he does. He's inflexible in the slightest?

I do like the conceit of being forced together due to the weather (classic trope), but this strange supernatural force as a metaphor for his heart condition or something is bewildering to me.

I think too much time was spent on minutia (and aough, the start with the wakeup) in the story, and we could have had more beats to develop this relationship. Maybe even the bar scene the prior night. The drink doesn't have to be mentioned until after. Could just have a sign with the menu saying it's on it.

---

Story Aside: Sweetie, I am dying that you had them reading FVNs in universe as books, although I take umbrage at the sort of what felt like your real life PoV criticism for why people not liking what you did was bad. There are real reasons to have issues with all three of those works, and it's a thought terminating cliche to just be like "they didn't understand the complexities". Unless the wolf is supposed to come off as less likable as opposed to being your mouthpiece."

----

Presentation: I appreciate your regular and repeated use of SFX. I didn't love the periodic silences that felt out of place.

I also liked that you had a developer title screen. Pop off, King.

I think the attack was well sequenced, and your characters were cute. Well done for the minimal game jam time.
My main thing is that your warning screen passed too quickly. You couldn't roll back, and it was a LOT of words for like 5 seconds. I read fast, but not that fast if I'm trying to be prescient of concerns.

Creativity: I'm kinda mixed here. Romcom trapped trope? Of course. Magic drink that binds? Kinda. Going feral from it to cannibalism? What?? Excuse em? Heart condition that masquerades as a supernatural force to hold someone from doing things that could hurt them?

Strange, but the issue might have been just not enough build up to it. With more time to prepare, these would have pulled off further.

Overall thoughts: I think you did a good job overall, but your focus on the narrative was out of place commiserate to your ending. You needed to remove some of the breakfast romance earning points and wakeup, and perhaps have more of the night before to show why he would even be invited over, Silver Bullet drink aside. Also need more definition for the why of the supernatural, because I don't think it being like a manifestation of the panic attack is a good explanation either.