I am like. So miserable right now lol <-- (I promise this is a compliment)
I work with children on a daily basis, so this story was pretty much engineered to hit me where it hurts... seeing the conditions that the kids endured, the way they were treated by all of STOP's employees, and watching Pavel's horrific transformation from a bright kid to a person broken by all the trauma piled onto him... uh, I am gonna have to try extra hard to be normal when I go to work in an hour LMAOOOOO. In particular, Dr. Deidre's earlier case study critiquing the rigorous schooling and Dr. Tan's comment about "throwing them snacks just to see if they run harder" mirror some of my real-life experiences (in education, not in a child testing lab, thank god) and sort of got my blood boiling haha.
I liked the art a lot - all of it is very cohesive, not to mention extremely well-presented. The combination of speech bubbles, NVL-style text, textboxes, and records combined with the panning backgrounds and the very dynamic sprites made this such a fun and beautiful game to watch.
Overall, I'm so so impressed with how polished this game is for something that was made for a 30-day jam; it speaks volumes of both your prior experience and your clear vision for what you wanted this game to be. There are so many other myriad Thoughts (not to mention vague Feelings that haven't yet become Thoughts) that I want to communicate about what an experience this game was, but I fear that if I tried to get them all down this comment would end up very disjointed and rambly, haha.
Thanks very much for sharing this game, and I'll definitely be checking out malViolence after I've finished with this year's Spooktober entries!