29th VN I read and rated from May Wolf 2024. This is so badminton ace core. The vore...lol

The um... vore... is an interesting premise for a murder mystery, and I honestly didn't see the twist coming. It was well done, in that aspect at least! It had a very satirical tone to it, and doesn't try to take itself too seriously, which is definitely a good thing all things considered. Good job and congrats on the entry :]

Blah blah blah. Tone is fantastic. Presentation is lacking. Basically what all the other comments said.

For real though, this got more than a couple good laughs out of me. I love your narrative voice. Even though this was a pretty simple murder mystery, your writing made it an awesome read.

Spoilers:

Theme: Vore expansion?

Story: I like the implementation of Vore as a mechanic for the murder mystery, and it was a fun explanation and series of discovery to get to the point. Very on-genre.

The part where I struggled with (which is mostly personal, mind you. People's relationship with humor is personal) is the constant zingers. It felt like everything was at the same level the whole time. I needed some variation-- some more moments of sincerity (if only briefly) to make the jokes pop harder. Or at least, the guise of sincerity, even if we can laugh at the thought of being sincere over something silly.

You have a way with humor, but I felt like I just was rammed into joke after joke after joke with no time to breathe.

Everyone's voices also felt kinda similar overall to me (which is perhaps part of my confusion for who was speaking) because it didn't feel like there was even a "straight man". (Comedy straight man, not hetero straight man.)

Presentation: No music, and I got confused with who was speaking the whole time given the irregularity of the expressions? And I think we could have had like... the sprite of the deceased rotated into a giant water tank-- that would have been funny, as opposed to the void.

Or like having the door closed before opening it to the scene, instead of the same hallway throughout-- I was initially confused why they were speaking sans sprites.

Creativity: Vore as a mechanism to help faciliate a murder? Honestly? Slay. Well done. I thought it was either like... nested vore (how did he get up to the room? In someone else's stomach) or finding the stashed body to then deposit at the room (also by vore) instead of it being used as an alibi.

Overall Thoughts: I enjoyed the overall conceit, but I personally had a bit of difficulty following who was saying what the entire time. I still appreciate your contribution to the may wolf game jam, and your wild idea for what it meant to have a vore mystery. I salute you!!!

Has some spoiler in it be warned if you read : 
So far it's the entry that made me laugh the most. I also discovered who was the culprit immediatly, probably because i'm way too strong and didn't just choose the least suspicious character on the grounds that it would be him.

A bit on the negative : The presentation is really jarring to me. most of the chosen bg makes little to no sense with the characters on screen and the character scale are all other the place. I can understand wanting to make characters appear differently, but that's not exactly how it works, using the scale too much makes one character hand almost as big as another character's head, which looks disturbing.
It would have been great to have at least some music management in there, I think it's an important part of any vn that should be adressed.

Other than that the writing and pacing was very enjoyable, I like the banter and the "no apologies" writting style, especially with the detective character. I liked it!

This is quite nice! The pacing is great and I like the humour. Lack of music is unfortunate.

I do like the concept of the story.  There were clues embedded throughout that came together during the conclusion.  In a mystery novel, every detail has a purpose, though the purpose sometimes may be to mislead.  Other than the boyfriend going out to his car, I feel that may have been underutilized.

On the visual side, one of the most jarring things for me to reconcile was the scaling of characters.  They were inconsistent throughout, and didn't scale appropriately with the backgrounds.  The love interest is standing in the car seat in one scene and barely taller than the couch arm in the next.  Punk wolf at the beginning was half the bull's size, yet at the end may have been slightly taller?

I just couldn't wrap my head around how a tiny wolf ever held a bull that was (sometimes) double his size with pointy sharp horns inside his stomach.  It may have been the point, but it was too much of a stretch for me to swallow, even with the intentional absurdity of the rest of the story.  If there was an in-world explanation for shrinking and growing in the vein of Alice in Wonderland, I somehow missed it.

I would be okay with a lack of music if there were at least sound cues indicating clues and an ambient track at the end to ratchet up the tension, but as-is, I feel it was a missed opportunity.  Mystery benefits heavily from sound and music.  I kept imagining the theme from Pink Panther during the investigation scenes, something jazzy with horns, a little serious, a little playful, and a little cheesy.

I imagine the itch.io game thumbnail was created after the deadline, otherwise it would have worked well as the title screen, with the image offset to the right side so the default menu overlay didn't cover part of it up.  

I realize that you may have run out of time, with only seconds remaining to submit, and should consider going back and adding to the game.  There's a fun little mystery in there, but even a diamond needs to be dug up, cut and polished to shine at its full potential, and I feel this game has potential.

So, ok, the presentation is admittedly quite sparse – there's no audio (discounting some sort of technological mishap on my end), the title screen is imageless, Hiram's name color is too dark, and some of the backgrounds work quite badly with the sprites in terms of perspective. When a story has such a strong sense of tone & style, it would be really nice for the visual and auditive aspects to reflect it as well. Although the writing feels very natural for the medium, there's really nothing making Maywolf Mysteries feel like it benefits from being a visual novel.

That being said, while information is not conveyed with perfect clarity all the time, the amazing script nails most of the crucial elements of the genre. The characters are memorable in their limited screentime and easy to get a grasp of, the in-story time limit makes the pacing feel sharp, and the solidly constructed mystery itself has a unique furry flair to it thanks to the, uh, mechanics. While the meta elements could have felt slightly tiresome with weaker execution, the wacky worldbuilding is just so much fun it's hard to care. Even the title strikes a perfect balance between descriptively literal and expressive.

Anyway, this might be on me here, but after forgetting to pay attention to the jam theme in particular, I'm not sure how it is supposed to be invoked. In any case, it feels like a missed opportunity not to do some meta stuff with it, considering the tone of the piece.

A quite unpolished game in general, but won me over with its sheer sense of fun.

A fun little mystery with some colourful characters! Glad it made it in under the deadline.

The detective's personality is so goofy I love it. Also 56 seconds before deadline is crazzy

I would read a series about random civilians solving crime under duress from Watzertitz