Let's start with what I liked: The well researched setting.
Well that was fast. Now, what I didn't like.
There appears to have been a lack of proofreading. I can accept the odd spelling mistake. I can accept the odd missing comma. I can even accept, though not easily, a misplaced apostrophe. But to spell the same word in two different ways in a single paragraph—and not only a single paragraph, but the paragraph that's revealed in response to "examine me", the first command most players will type—this I cannot accept. I will note things like this and highlight them in reviews, pausing only to mock you.
Richard Otter, consider yourself duly mocked.
But my annoyance didn't start here. Could someone perhaps explain to me this obsession authors seem to have with putting backstory and characterisation outside the game itself? Surely this is sheer laziness. I don't want to read backstory, I want to discover it through the game.
This is what short opening sequences are for. This is what introductions are for.
The game takes an interesting setting, applies the obvious results of research and turns it into a treasure hunt. I don't like treasure hunts. I don't care about the loot the PC picks up. I most especially don't want to do this in a game that doesn't treat "look in" and "look under" as proper verbs, leading to the response "you see no such thing" when such a thing does, indeed, exist. It may be a limitation of the system, but that doesn't matter to me as a player.
If you're implementing a treasure hunt in which the PC puts things in some kind of sack-like object, please don't make me type "open suitcase. put object in suitcase. close suitcase." repeatedly. While your at it, auto-opening doors may be a good idea. And speaking of doors, the response "You can't go that way (at present)." is deeply annoying. If you disallow something have a good reason and tell the player why.
The characters are generally as life-like as the suitcase.
