Blunt Soul Trauma

This was fascinating! You picked great assets to use, and you work with them very efficiently. The elements that you created directly (I imagine?) do a lot, too: the 'halo' behind Haydee immediately intrigued me, for instance, and it was very cool to see the script offer a couple of lines to contextualise it, and then see it used later to tell us about Haydee's state of mind. (If mind is even the right word for talking about angels, &c &c.)

I wasn't quite sure about the phrase 'twain ropes' (definitely not 'twin ropes'?); I suspect 'a shit pay' would be better as either 'a shit salary', or 'a shit paycheck' (in NA spelling), or just 'shit pay'; and in one line, 'It's shell' probably ought to read 'Its shell'. But those are the most minor of nitpicks, and I am mentioning them because there weren't any larger issues. Overall I thought this read very well, with some lovely uses of language that sketched in an engaging, unsettling background to the story.

Narratively, it was also neat to read a VN in this game jam that gives us a third person's glimpse of a relationship rather than placing the point-of-view character's own romantic relationship(s) at the front of our attention. That aspect also makes this function powerfully as a self-contained short story, which is sensible scoping for a time-limited jam, as well…

This was really cool and well written! I love the way you depict divinity here, and the process of becoming divine is so fascinating. The way in which we explore Alexis' psyche, hear Ferida's thoughts and come to realize where that comes from... you've made such an interesting world!

this is sososososo amazing!!!! i loved playing this, all of the worldbuilding is impeccable (and really inspiring for a humans-becoming-angels/fallen angels thing i'm writing, i'm chewing on this a lot) and i adore how you did foreshadowing to the later events of the story. alexis is also such a sadly relatable character to me tbh and the soul-merging sequence is such a sweet and sad climax. feeling bad for her, and then realizing we were feeling her, and getting the time to sit with it and with ferida's own feelings. its done extremely uniquely, i am genuinely crazily *such* a big fan of the artistry here. i only wish i couldve gotten even more time with them <3

i loved this. absolutely fantastic. im at a loss for anything insightful to say but, uh, really really good. i don't think i'll ever be able to forget it.

Finishing the game, I screenshot the different passages that show up during the titular Blunt Soul Trauma. The act of comprehending what was wrong with Alexis felt perverted. It put me in the shoes of Ferida and maybe even Haydee to some extent. But after attempting to machine translate some of them, I had realized it was more ambiguous than I realized.

The ritual involving souls unnerved me on a personal level. But with this little experiment, I'd wondered if my efforts to "forgive" or "understand" Alexis was the intentional effect. One would try to make sure they aren't blindly loving an actual criminal. But another would probably want to understand how they got to this point.

Aside from all of that, the world implied outside of the story is really interesting. There's a lot to infer about angels, from how their corpse decomposes to their halos. It played a massive factor in getting me invested in this angel's intentions (while they put Ferida in the human's intestines).

Absolutely loved this game—10/10 experience