This game really makes me want to be able to recommend it, but its flaws are simply too severe. I don't believe spoilers will greatly affect anyone's experience, but they are ahead. If you need a TL;DR, this game has some beautiful artistic moments but technical laziness and 'loose screws' for a lack of a better word damage those moments severely. Even if you enjoy walking sim games, you may want to pass this one up.
Walking sim type games like this tend to be rather stigmatized, especially one that's so short for $6, so I want to be clear that neither of those are problems for me. Virginia, Paratopic, What Remains of Edith Finch, Gone Home--these are good games. I like all of those games. And, a game that lasts 30 minutes but that i think about for days is worth much more than one I play for 30 hours and forget about by lunch break. So I want to be clear that neither of those aspects are what I'm judging.
This game has some very effective and powerful moments, but lazy technical work hampers its ability to use interactivity to convey its message. Right off the bat, the player character animations feel floaty, robotic, and not natural at all--for many people that's a death knell by itself. The animation of a deer walking or prancing in the woods, an animation we will be seeing the whole game, should definitely have more work put into it. When your game minimizes mechanics to focus on visuals, those visuals need to work. My first playthrough only lasted a few minutes entirely because of how bad that animation was, but I tried again after seeing some reviews and seeing the game was fairly short. (Again, not necessarily a bad thing! I wouldn't have continued playing a longer game, and would probably have just refunded it here.)
The second time, after the field with the hostile bucks, I tried cutting across a field and ignoring the path. Cuz, y'know, I'm a deer, not a backpacker, and it was clear that it wasn't friendly territory. Somehow I not only met an invisible wall--one that really didn't need to be there--but seemed to be trapped in a triangle of them. So I quit and reloaded from checkpoint. That's not just a bad technical choice, but a bad design one--the developer clearly wanted to make sure the player knew the bucks were hostile in case they didn't stop to eat berries, so they funneled you into the more or less forced interaction with the buck that chases you out of the level. Either let me miss things, or make those barriers visible and obvious. Put a cliffside there or some reason a deer wouldn't be able to progress.
Third time was the charm and I was able to complete the game, but that's already a bad first impression and a bad second impression after I changed my mind.
Then, after a scene where you're supposed to follow a swarm of fireflies, the swarm will move a certain distance, stop, and then "turn around" in a very bizarrely video gamey way where all the fireflies turn in perfect, mechanical harmony. Visual hiccups like that, again, hurt many times worse when the game is a very short and primarily visual experience.
With all those things said, there are some moments that hit pretty hard. When the fireflies no longer had to act on game mechanics and could instead simply be part of a cutscene where the fawn fell asleep, it was beautiful and touching and gave this sense of momentary but beautiful shelter in the midst of hostility. The memory/dream sequence could have been a little less hammy to start out with, but it still hit pretty damn well, especially at the end. But notably, these scenes are still surrounded by small failures of technique.
The 'moral choice' afterwards seemed a little unfair, since flashing "press right click to attack" on the screen and removing the feeding mechanic looks like a tutorialized mechanic, which most players will engage in automatically. I guess the developer thought the same and made the first two targets fawns/does so you might think twice before attacking them, and I did--but that also makes it not much of a choice. If our character at this point were an especially strong buck and could exact revenge on the ones who attacked him, that might be more of a decision. If the berries mechanic didn't feel completely artificial (there was no player feedback whatsoever for eating them) then the fact that there were only two small brushes of berries, followed by a giant field of them later, might have made me feel pretty good about choosing not to attack, even given the previous issues I mentioned. But the "better than them" achievement honestly felt hollow given those issues.
With a bit more care and time to work out its kinks, this could have been a really good experience. Deer are very important creatures to me if you couldn't tell by my name and avatar. They were very common where I grew up and I feel deep spiritual connection with them even today. So I think I was probably the ideal 'target audience' for something like this. If I'm even feeling conflicted about it, I think most people are going to bounce off.
I hope the developer reads this review and makes something similar with a little more technique and precision, because I do like what they tried to make here. But that's the thing--I like what they TRIED to make. What I actually played was, well...disappointing. Sorry. There is some real heart here but I struggle to say it was made with love.
