WALLS offers excellent drama masterfully and swiftly established with believable and relatable characters and well crafted dialogue. While that core is really strong a handful of aspects prevent it from reaching its true potential.

Most important in this are the audiovisual elements. Though everything is of pretty good quality, their implementation leaves something to be desired. Sound effects are often too low in comparison with a sparse and loud musical tracks, making the whole audio part awkward and uneven. The blocking is another very inconsistent element here, with characters sprites that appear on-screen without following an internal logic and some transitions failing to properly complement the time-space progression of the story.

Another problem, though minor, is the pacing. Most of the build up is paced perfectly but the climax and the falling action go by a little too fast. Readers don't get proper time to linger in these pretty strong emotions which curbs their impact. There's almost a rushed feel once we enter "act three."

Still, I can safely recommend this one for that great core idea. Dialogue in particular works masterfully to build these characters and deliver most of the emotional impact. Even if it doesn't get all 5 stars, it is honestly one of my favourite Novembears.

Made with Honey is an alright VN with not much of a point. Most elements of this project are of perfectly average quality and they coalesce to make a perfectly average VN. While that does mean there are points to improve everywhere, it also means it's not a particularly poor experience. Some notable issues include little pay off and characters overreacting to some very mild twists the story takes, but even those aren't much hindrance. Just very middle of the road in all aspects.

This was a lovely read!

It was a short story I breezed through, because the more slicey lifey parts didn't suffer from the usual grievances I have with the genre, and the more spicy part had me so engaged that it was over before I even knew it.

The storytelling and writing were the what I enjoyed the most, but I am going to keep the surprise and say no more.

The decision on using silhouettes of the sprites is a choice I liked quite a bit. It's a microcosm of things I like seeing developers do in a jam - a resourceful way to work with both given resources and strict limitations, but also giving it an interesting stylistic flare.

My only complaints have already been acknowledged in the game page description: the placeholder backgrounds and the two instances of audio that aren't tied to any volume slider. I hope in an update the developer will add stylised backgrounds that match the silhouette sprites, or some carefully curated/edited photos that match the excellent atmosphere of the scenes.

All in all a strong debut VN and a thrilling short story.