Ooh... boy.
I promised Mado on Twitter that I would play protoViolence as soon as it came out. Well, uh, I had to postpone that until today. Partly because assignments and my own game project took over, but also because... I played malViolence already. I loved it, and I also had an idea what the conclusion to its prequel would be like. I knew it would be heavy, and I would need a good mental space for it.
I read protoViolence, and it was exactly what I expected it would be; something that's beautiful and horrifying. Of course, technically it's very impressive! I didn't know Ren'py was capable of all this. The dynamic panning, the smooth switch between dialogue boxes and ADV textboxes, the voiced bits, and the music all come together to create an experience that I feel like I should be paying for.
Story-wise, as a malViolence player I already knew how it was going to end, but even so the way the events unfolded kept me hooked on. I remember one of my small complaints about malViolence was that one of the main characters was kind of under-developed and there was too much tell over show, and protoViolence did a lot of work to justify this and flesh out everyone. Advancing through the gradual buildup and the inevitable end was very satisfying - but that actually doesn't sound like the best way to describe it considering the nature of the plot...
In the end, I highly recommend protoViolence. I've played all three of Mado and their team's VNs (Bad Faith, malViolence, and this), each one has shown improvements and great quality and I would definitely want to see more fantastic works from them.