Adventure segments (and more, actually) are fully implemented in a local build, but due to a bug in the Unreal engine I wasn't able to get anything to cook correctly until I upgraded it on Sunday. Soooo nothing loads. I'm glad that at the very least the end of the 1st sequence was impactful, as I really wanted to build towards that as a way to show off the tech. I hope in a few weeks I'll be able to look back on Ehrein's terrifying rigging as something to laugh about, but for now it really sucks.
I agree that the character introductions are weak. They're close, but too subtextual at the moment. Ideally the drop into the adventure segment would've allowed us to move past setting the tone and relationships into contextualizing the story, but as it stands I think I pushed exposition out too far and there's not enough balance.
With regards to the dialogue feeling clipped, I think I need to find a better balance between prose and leveraging the cinematic tech I have at my fingertips with Unreal. The path forward should be to use the cinematics to fill in those blanks. I think what's here is a good start, but it lacks the cinematic glue to hold it together.