Most certainly one of the most ambitious interactive fiction projects that I have ever experienced, with all the benefits and several of the issues that come with such.

The game drops you in quickly, to its credit, with a reasonable if lengthy prologue, followed by an important event, before the story properly begins. Choice is prevalent, and impacts a healthy amount of dialogue and story. Seemingly innocent options to not speak can result in entirely unexpected new scenes where an alternative character opts to talk to you instead, showing not only a great commitment and forethought from the author, but providing a great potential for replays.

This brings us to an important point regarding this game. There are skill checks for various statistics (strength, agility, persuasion...), but these are not straight checks. Your statistics improve your chances, but there is always a behind-the-scenes roll, meaning that failure is always possible. The attitude of the game is that failure is not the end of the game, but merely a different path, which is laudable in the genre and in my opinion, certainly adds to the experience. The author, in fact, recommends against reloading, and simply accepting the outcome, no matter what that may be. This seemed reasonable, but I have found that these elements come a little into conflict in the first chapter. Simply put, in the first part, your chance of failure can seem so high that at times you wonder if your abilities are working at all. There are entire scenes and outcomes locked behind multiple, successive skill checks which make the odds of ever seeing it - if you play by the author's suggested rules - incredibly unlikely, short of having dozens of playthroughs amounting to potentially hundreds of hours. All of this may indeed be somewhat intentional, especially given the brutal location of the first part, but the outright back-to-back failures began to erode my trust as a reader. Fortunately, the second part felt much more reasonable in this regard.

There is little to no art, to set expectations, but neither does it need it. The writing is of a consistent, good quality, and rarely exceeds its welcome with any enormous, indigestible reams. There is a large amount of profanity, perhaps enough to make my immersion waver at points, but given the rest of the prose I am willing to ignore any of my petty annoyances. The world-building is relatively gentle, and familiar enough to grasp quickly, and this cautious pace continues with the introduction of characters as well. Thankfully, I found the first companion to be interesting, and remarkably, this was in despite of my relatively poor relationship with them. Conversations and scenes vary subtly, sometimes signifcantly, depending upon your current friendship - or lack thereof, and if this is a sign of things to come with other characters, it can only be a good thing.

Which brings me to my last and final point to make, an inevitable hazard of such an ambitious project, in that it is simply not finished yet, and is not likely to be any time soon. At time of writing, part 2 of 15 is  available, after what I can gather is a couple years of development. That is not to discredit it, as I would have much rather experienced it as is rather than not at all, but it must be said all the same. Given the quality shown so far, the attention to detail, and the sprawling multitude of options given to the player, it is no small task to continue, and not one I envy. Still, if you are at all interested in fantasy interactive fiction and do not mind venturing into a somewhat darker, challenging setting, I can only encourage you to give it a go - just don't be frightened to make the odd save, just in case.