I loved it! While the subject matter is definitely not for everyone (I read this both on my own and with a some people who found it extremely boring), as someone who studied law, works in public administration, and loves political geography, I was personally ready and primed to like this game.
The implementation of the theme, the journalistic quality of the work, the way it tries to teach real life lore to horny furries via gay wolf shenanigans, were all just a joy. And everything in the presentation looks crisp and purposeful.
Minor Spoilers to follow
The story was fun but surprisingly engaging: the scene where the game shows you real life pictures of Östersundom today was a genuine gut punch that almost made me teary. My main gripe with the game is everything that follows that moment: the way the game goes straight into explaining what happened in Östersundom right after showing the pictures lessens the impact somewhat (don't explain to me what you've already shown, the pictures are worth more than a thousand words!).
And the final scene between Dom and Sipoo, while very nicely written, is part of something that left me a bit confused about the game. There are some hints here and there that Dom might not be completely happy with Sipoo and might have some doubts about their relationship after all, and this seems to be reinforced in the final scene when, given the opportunity to do otherwise, the two don't really reconnect and keep going their separate ways. However, this underlying thread doesn't really seem to be explored and I'm not sure what the story is doing with this, and how it relates to the overall metaphor.
Some minor nitpicks and assorted feedback:
- The quotes at the beginning of the game disappear way to quickly for me to properly absorb them. Those were not easy sentences to read in what felt like under 5 seconds.
- For something that is trying to report on a real life story, the dates were a bit confusing throughout. The first date appearing in the game contains no hint about whether it's supposed to be read in European or American format, and later on the format sometimes switches from one mode to the other.
- I believe the skip function could use some improvement: while for a story this size it works well enough, I would need for it to be *way* faster for it to be really useful in any larger project. I also noticed it stopped skipping on its own when it came to the aforementioned pictures.
- The game throws a lot of Finnish words at you and it is really difficult to keep track of who's who and what's what, although this problem was mostly gone by the second reading. Still I do think throwing some occasional reminder for reader's benefit, at least in English version, would go a long way. Small things like saying the occasional "Prime Minister Vanhanen" instead of just Vanhanen would help.