A dying man’s last companion turning out to be Death itself sounds like it should read as morbid comedy, and this slice-of-death visual novel instead builds something real and tender out of that exact premise. Mori is running out of time. The figure who arrives to walk him through his final stretch is Memento, a Reaper rendered as an adorable, dog-like creature whose cheerful, gentle exterior sits in quiet, deliberate tension with the actually quite grim job he’s there to do. That contrast, comfort wrapped tightly around inevitability, defines the whole reading experience from start to finish.
Team Lycoris came together specifically to build Before You Depart as their entry for the 2023 May Wolf furry visual novel jam. The small team behind it, composer Camazule, artist Arcadia, along with Bowser Puma, CetusOtter, and Rackoon, has stayed active together since, marking the game’s first anniversary the following June and going on to help organize a separate jam of their own the following year. Built within that single jam month, the story moves through Mori’s remaining time with real economy. It touches on unfulfilled potential, the specific ache of illness, and the strange intimacy that can form between two people, or a person and something not quite human, who both know exactly how a story is going to end.
Much of that intimacy plays out at the Lycoris Community Theater, a setting tied closely enough to Mori’s own past that it carries real emotional weight by the time a side character named Stella gets pulled into one of the game’s more understated, aching moments. Revisiting that same location more than once across the relatively brief story gives it a sense of accumulated history that a jam-length game rarely bothers building, each return trip carrying a little more context than the last. The developer has been candid that the bond between Mori and Memento isn’t framed as a conventional romance. It reads more as Memento experiencing overwhelming emotion for what might be the first time in his existence, and the writing carries that restraint through in how it handles their connection, present and real without ever needing to resolve into something tidier than the situation allows. Memento’s own arc pushes further than I expected once he starts directly engaging with what Mori’s memories actually contain. It forces him to reckon with questions about his own nature that a Reaper character rarely gets asked to sit with this openly, questions about what he’ll even be once there’s nobody left for him to guide.
I found myself tearing up well before the story’s actual ending, and thinking back on specific people in my own life more than once along the way. That kind of personal pull is a real hard thing for any short-form visual novel to earn, let alone one built inside a single month for a jam. The recurring motif of red spider lilies ties death and the afterlife across the game’s UI, character names, and imagery. It does occasionally feel like it’s reaching for the same symbolic note more often than necessary, a minor structural quibble in an otherwise tightly controlled short story.
Arcadia illustrated every piece of art in the game personally, backgrounds and character graphics alike, all rendered at a consistently high resolution that holds up well even in close detail. That kind of consistency is harder to pull off solo than it looks from the outside. The warm, sunset-toned palette contrasted against deep blacks gives even the heaviest scenes real visual restraint, letting occasional bursts of other color stand out precisely because the rest of the palette stays so consistent. Mori’s rougher, weathered design reflects a hard life clearly, while Memento’s soft, approachable look deliberately undercuts the reality of what he actually represents, and the contrast between the two of them carries real weight without either design needing to say so directly.
Camazule composed thirteen original tracks for the score, later collected into a standalone soundtrack release alongside the album art Camazule also illustrated personally, a rare case of the same person handling both a game’s music and the cover art for its eventual release. One specific cue, tied to a dance sequence near the story’s close, landed harder for me than anything else in the whole runtime. It’s the kind of musical choice that only works because everything leading up to it has spent the whole runtime quietly building toward exactly that moment. A separate asset pack extends the experience further for anyone who finishes and wants more, sketches, concept art, a desktop wallpaper collection, and even a set of Memento-themed emotes originally made for the developer’s own Discord server. That extra material is a real sign of just how much of a devoted following this small jam project ended up building around one character in particular.
Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android all support the finished release. Its origins as an entry in a mature-rated furry jam mean the wider setting carries that context, but the core story itself reads as a focused, careful meditation on mortality rather than anything built around that framing specifically. It’s a short enough read that I finished the whole thing in a single sitting, and I’d recommend doing the same rather than splitting it up across multiple separate sessions.
Verdict
Before You Depart takes a jam-length runtime and uses it with real discipline, building an affecting meditation on mortality around the quiet, contradictory friendship between a dying man and the gentle-seeming figure sent to guide him through his final days. Its restraint in handling Mori and Memento’s bond, honest about what it is without forcing it into a tidier romantic shape, gives the story real emotional integrity. Arcadia’s warm, controlled art direction alongside Camazule’s original score carry that weight all the way through to an ending that earns the reaction it gets. The recurring red spider lily symbolism leans a little heavy-handed by the story’s end, but that’s a small blemish on an otherwise remarkably complete short story for something built in a single month.
