Spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn't read this yet.
Theme: I'm not seeing any explicit pertinence to "expansion", at least, with an authorial intent. I do understand that this is a side story to your main work, but I think it could stand to be more explicitly present in the focus, or that the lens shifts to still cover the same content but reframes it in a way more relevant to the narrative.
Story: I did quite enjoy your voices for your characters. They had verisimilitude. The flashback to the retelling did feel authentically one-sided. Even prior to death, the father can't help but overstep his boundaries with his son, monologuing at him instead of allowing for a dialog between the two.
Albeit, just because the action makes sense in character, doesn't mean that it was fully appealing. I would have enjoyed it more if we had further flashbacks like the start, instead of just being told w/o the corresponding visuals.
It was nice to have that sort of wizard of Oz element with the flashback as bookends to the piece, where originally it was in sepia, and then it was in color, although I don't think we needed like the exact language verbatim twice, given the shortness of the piece. We could have had it truncated a bit the second time around.
It was a narrative that knew what it wanted to do, but that sort of artificially constrained it to the limits of getting the information from the father, instead of trying to cultivate the dialogue between the father who has realized he's done wrong, and the son who doesn't even get a real chance for a word in edgewise.
I also thought it was very authentic how he passed away so quickly, and how he was told he can pass on. That reminded me of things my mother has said about her her own father's passing, so that resonated with me, even if only for my secondhand experience.
I didn't love the narrative swap over from the death to the ending though. Pacing-wise, even if we've had in week time, my reading time was much more immediate, and it felt a bit gauche to me.
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My own wonder that not everyone has: What does it mean for a wolf to have a lion's heart, in a world with anthropomorphic creatures? What does it mean to have farm animals when they're evidently... house animals?
Other bonus item: really enjoyed the quip about tying the knot in both senses. Wordplay yes!
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Presentation: I appreciate you making new sprites from scratch in spite of your main game's work, just for the purposes of the game jam (I understand that was the rules, but I think it should be acknowledged all the same).
What was strange of sorts was the positioning of the characters on the screen, at least, in the start. Were they sitting next to each other? Should one have been offscreen? The father's staring at the screen w/ the son mostly not present, does work for the narrative of "Father lecturing Son", but it doesn't work as much for me with "Couple speaking w/ one another".
I think you would have been better served to have one as a side-sprite and the other one screen, so that we're in that character's POV, instead of wondering whose POV we're in visually while being stared at by the characters.
As I eluded to prior, I would have liked more flashbacks to have their own corresponding visuals, and I found it curious that the flashback was in a different art style than the main work. You played with that presentation not only in terms of the filter (sepia) but style, which gave it a more... disney? carton vibe, if that makes sense? I'm not the biggest art person so someone else may actively speak up and say otherwise.
A minor issue I had was you said the father's nose was crooked, but it didn't look crooked. In a related vein, I liked the father's eyes more than the sons-- they felt kind of like doll eyes, whereas his felt more "alive?". And was the father's angry sprite the same as his flushed sprite, as it seemed to have been used for both purposes?
Creativity: Again, I liked your wizard of OZ moment, and the "father on the chair monologuing" was very Moral Oral and other similar works with that perspective. With it feeling like it was tied to your main work, that may have created some narrative constraints that you couldn't quite escape.
You did your own music, and that felt appropriate for the scenes. Well done.
Overall thoughts: Welcome to the fvn scene! hope this commentary doesn't come off too poorly. You're certainly a workhorse for putting three game jam entries in of sizable lengths all as solo projects (and one on the last day!).
I think this one could have come off stronger with some more polish, like additional scenes in the flashbacks to go along with the dialog, given we did already get a decent amount of depth to those remembered narratives.
I still did quite enjoy the character's voices, and I know one of my concurrent watchers was invested in taking a look at your main project through these works, so I hope you can get more attention there as well.
Narratively, due to it all being a sort of monologue like in a theater production, the narrative has to do a lot more work (while on the stage for a one man show the visuals may be more minimalistic, the medium here needs more visuals to work with because they don't have the gravitas of the live performer).
Anyway, congrats on your May Wolf, and you'll see me again as I continue going through the game jams because... you did three! Powerful.