record scratch, freeze-frame

Yeah, that's me reviewing the pornographic furry visual novel. You're probably wondering how I got into this mess. Well, it all started when my friend, an erotic hypnotist, decided to troll me. Actually I guess it started when I was a genderqueer furry with weird fetishes but the trolling is more interesting as a premise.

Because you see I'm kind of a huge picky bitch and was a little 'eh' on the demo for this one, plus it generally had the vibe of being 'wholesome' which is both unpleasant as hell and also I like them fucked up. But she bought me the game as a present so I'm now like, oh for sure I'll just give it a shot. I play through two of the four routes and I'm having a good time.

Now, this is a visual novel about magically turning into shit and doing BDSM shit, so you feel however you feel about that. There are very few conflicts in this thing that aren't resolved within a scene, and the biggest attempt at having one is shockingly ill-advised and unmotivated. Most scenarios eventually turn into just a series of disconnected scenes happening months apart. Multiple routes have long scenes of just explaining what furries are and how great they are if you somehow got into this thing without already knowing-- which I think you could do! Everyone abides by the actual sensible rules of safety in kink relationships which makes sense in a story where it's supposed to be regular people actually doing that stuff as real people would aside from the magic powers that turn you into a lactating cow girl etc etc. There's also a suspicious lack of any real like, homophobia or anything in this world. They come close to a character being transphobic at once point and again the person in question just chills out immediately. What I'm saying is that this is low stakes cheesecake (mouse joke) aimed at specific kinks and I had a great time and that's my review. Back to the story of me being owned.

The third route I did was the one involving hypnotism, and like I said I'm talking to an actual hypno practitioner so I'm joking with her like "haha this will be just like your job." Apparently it's decently accurate according to her but I wouldn't know. But THEN. THEN it turns out that the actual story is about having an alt persona incepted into the protagonist's brain and them making a deal and now she's just plural in a somewhat cartoon way. And as I've written on my website recently, my ass just recently figured out I'm plural. I've been had. This gift game was a landmine set to own me. I've been owned.

The story of that route isn't actually about being a real-life system in any way, but it's got enough details that I think the writer didn't do it without research, at least. And then a bunch of other things in it have a lot of eerie parallels to things happening in my life that could not have even been predicted by my friend! Infinite damage is dealt to my psyche. She rolled a natural 20 on me. I was entirely defeated by this gesture and have no choice but to accept my fate.

Also, I made fun of the game a little on social media and the writer liked the post. That was bad but it's like the third person to hoist me like that after game designer Yoshiro Kimura and science fiction writer Matthew Stover so I guess I wasn't as devastated as I could have been. Zoe seems very nice I hope the next game's development is going well.

Pretty cute all the way through!

I'd backed this game near the start of it's development in like 2021, I followed updates for a bit, but eventually figured for a visual novel it was better to wait for the full package, and was pleasantly surprised when I got a steam key for it when it came out there! I didn't have the time to actually play through the game fully until now, and it was lots of fun to see the added/finished content!

There's not a crazy amount to critique in terms of game play, it's a visual novel with branching paths, you read and make a couple choices lol. I guess my only "game play" complaint is that the Felicia route is clearly the "intended route" as it has the most content and branches to check out, which can in turn make some of the other routes feel a liiiiitle underbaked. But it's not a deal breaker as each route offers something fun and unique!

The art is good all throughout! It's a little funny when you can tell what was made early in development vs late. But it's also kind of cool to see the different artists skill and style develop between certain gallery scenes.

The writing is really sweet too! I think sometimes it was a little too on the nose or cheesy for me, but I think it all has it's charms. The game never gets too heavy or anything, but all the characters feel thought out, and the little moments of drama are fun! The big twist in the Gavin route is really clever and fun to play out, it's probably the most dramatic the game gets (I guess the Julie route has some of that but it's all played off in a fun way that it doesn't feel quite as dark, just exciting and fun!).

Overall I'm glad I played this game finally! If you're into this kind of stuff, it's got a lot of charm and is worth checking out! I'm also excited to check out what's been done on the sequel!

Oh and to all my friends seeing this! Hi! I try to keep a habi of not just talking about porn or fetishes unless I'm super chill with those people so sorry if this is how you had to find out I'm into this kind of stuff LOL.

This is a delight to play, and not just in the very horny way that you'd expect with a game like this. Included in the game is a toggle to disable all 18+ content, which I thought was very funny when I first saw it -- but the writing in this VN is just lovely, the characters are cute and charming, and this could easily stand alone without the (really good) explicit content. So much love and care went into making every part of this VN and I sincerely adore it. Margaret is such a relatable character and I want her life so bad. It's the ultimate dream: Become a librarian, get really into tea, gather a cozy circle of close friends, and just settle down for a life of comfort (and lots of reading).

Shoutout to that one meme on twitter that led me to this game and my newfound desire to be an adorable mousegirl :3

Mice Tea’s Felicia route (hereafter referred to as Felicia with italics) is fascinating to me as a work that is explicitly a fandom object about a community that is usually not considered a fandom as much as a literary genre or community of insular artists. The furry community is a fandom, yes, and I think it’s why this lasers into the communal aspects of TGTF (the chosen acronym for gender-bender transformation kink porn, hereafter referred to by said acronym) as well, but it clearly is conversing with the community in ways that Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme, Student Transfer, and Max’s Big Bust, other notable community efforts, don’t.

Those works, while enjoyable (even if two out of the three are completely impossible to find sexy despite being kink fiction), are very much straightforwardly... fiction with a gender-bender theme. Felicia is about the relationships that people have with gender-bending as a concept, how fiction about it affects them, and using kink as a tool for liberating self-expression. It’s got unobtrusive-but-witheringly-deep cuts to old figures (I am pretty sure that there’s a fucking Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki reference in one random NPC’s attire) and tempers it with newer approaches.

While Felicia’s explicit sex positivity is extremely cool and worth highlighting and shouting out as a hallmark of more “modern” TGTF, it being a centrally trans narrative instead of a trans-fetishizing narrative is the dead giveaway. The narrative thrust is different, heterosexuality is not compulsory, and it centers on a wlw romance that genuinely focuses on fluffy, cuddly intimacy and not just sex (even if there’s a lot of fucking and most of it has way above-par anatomy and prose for this genre). It’s not deep or even particularly sharp with its character beats, but it’s refreshing, smutty, and enjoyable nonetheless.

This genuine character arc elides my biggest issue with Ms. Transformistress’ pieces outside of this game, which are all coming from a similar intent of genuine trans catharsis, but are hamstrung by their short-form nature. The ethics of this fetish are always murky, but when there’s insufficient setup for establishing the character as “oh they’re actually trans and just don’t know it yet and this non-consensual change is actually exactly what they want” without essentially being a post-hoc retcon it feels tacky. Here, while Felicia is still ultimately that exact plot beat, the drawn-out narrative nature allows it to actually feel earned. The foreshadowing beats, while not exactly subtle, feel real. And despite all this, Felicia succeeds at only feeling preachy when the main character is, in-universe, demonstrating to a male-identifying person how to properly eat pussy. And, like, that’s a public service. The rest of the time, it maintains its fluffy, laid-back, relaxed atmosphere with ease.

The contrast between Felicia’s experiences and Gavin’s allows for genuinely incisive portrayals of dysphoria and euphoria, with Gavin’s hotel metaphor being a genuinely effective way to express emotions impossible for almost anybody to feel. There are portrayals of bigger things that change - people becoming more romantic, sexualities shifting, but equally important are the little beats. One person becomes clumsier and has to exert effort into making themselves present while they want, while the other dances around environments and situations they fumbled through before. The unspoken pressure of dysphoria on their executive function is essentially what causes the entire game to happen.

Gavin is an older-school TGTF protagonist, in a characterization that evokes early-middle Tedd from El Goonish Shive. A tinkerer and researcher, he instigates the transformations and has an interest in the act itself. He considers himself a man no matter what, and even when he has a vagina and breasts he is treated as and written as a man with he/him pronouns. His sex scene in the route is essentially femdom, despite everybody having female bodies, and he then switches bweteen to male and female bodies afterwards. Felicia, by contrast, is is treated as a woman by everybody within the narrative and her gender transformation is early in, more-restrained than Gavin’s, and her body never switches back to its AMAB presentation.

The route has four different side characters who each get a chance to transform, and they each relate differently - one takes to Gavin’s interest in the mechanics and act of transforming, instead being a middle-late Tedd who adopts more genderfluid self-perception (while still smuggling it out of the cities to help trans homies in the sticks), another takes after Felicia and is an explicitly trans blushing mess, one is entirely disinterested in gender presentation and essentially chooses a form out of tool-like interest (notably, this character is a real-life OC that appears in all goddamn sorts of kink stuff I’ve run into, and has few compunctions about scenarios) and one is completely unchanged by the transformation because to her it’s just a way of reinforcing their love of an animal.

These topics aren’t brought up as serious roadblocks to be pondered, they’re touchstones used to establish resonance for the explicitly queer audience it courts. There’s something to the act of transforming and its consequences that grabs somebody and turns them on, and even if it’s just effectively the result of some crossed mental wires, it’s still going to grab each person in different ways. I’ve been a lurker in the TGTF community since before I was in puberty, back when I didn’t have any other frame of reference for how somebody could metamorphose into a form that is, for all intents and purposes, far better for them and way hotter. I infrequently contribute to it, even now, under an array of pen names, alt accounts, and anonymous submissions that are, vaguely, traceable to a central internet personality that refuses to decompartmentalize herself. It’s one of the few places that, even as an unremarkable and forgotten bystander, truly feels like a home to her. This is one of the few works that gets it.

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Really sugary-sweet stuff. Empathetically queer, memorable soundtrack, and quite compassionate to its adorable characters. Pursues some interesting narrative threads about modern humans navigating the world as fans of niche fandoms like furry, tf.

Solid trans rep too! Wish there was a character somewhere between "totally ignorant egg" and "rich, successfully passing" but stories like these are all about extremes, innit

Easily one of my favorite visual novels I've ever played in my life. I played through it during a particularly rough patch and understanding myself and my life though the characters was... really cathartic.
The game is written impeccably. The themes are all amazing. The characters are amazing, and deeply relatable. Their struggles and their life is one I see reflected in my own, and all in all it was a very, very fun and life-changing experience.
Also, it got me into tea! I recommend a nice warm mug of chai, probably something with fruit like an apple cinnamon, with lots of sugar and some honey. Drink it while enjoying this great visual novel! Maybe something will happen... ;p