Unplayable. The overbearing mountain of unnecessary dialogue in the way of inner monologue makes this impossible to enjoy. I find it insulting that you don't trust the reader to assess the dialogue themselves. For example when a character emphasises a word or term in a sentence like Helena's "Not through crude punishment, but through... fine-tuning." we don't need you to follow with the inner monologue "'Fine-tuning.' Sounds like..." just let the dialogue speak for itself and trust your audience to think that. Or when you go from meeting Helena to Laura we don't need a full 19 lines of inner monologue assessing the character. We know she's distinctly different, and we can make our own assessment of what type of person she is based on the attire, the body, the facial expressions etc. all 19 lines I had to click through are spontaneous thoughts that take a fraction of a second for the reader to conclude on their own.
Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback, we really appreciate it.
You’re right about the inner monologue being heavy, it’s something we’ve already talked about internally, and we’ll be making an effort to trim it down.
It’s a challenge to express everything we want without relying too much on internal narration, but we’ll definitely work on finding a better balance. Thanks again for pointing it out.