Ahh I love this! The story is so intriguing.. !! I stopped playing after Zaheer's father showed up, and in one hour of gameplay I couldn't get enough of this game. The scenarios are really good, I love the look of those snowy towns. And the rooms are so.. vintage! I love it! :)
The gem system is really cool. I didn't play a lot with it though and I didn't manage to figure out what I was suppose to do with the gem shards?
The crafting system is awesome! I like that all characters have something they can craft! Really useful!
The battle system was alright, I guess. I didn't feel like the battles were too difficult but neither too easy. I like that you need to interact with the monsters in the map to trigger battles. Because. Sometimes you don't want to fight, you just want to gather stuff in peace! XD lol
I came across a few bugs while playing. The first when hunting the wolves at the beginning, if you kept exploring the whole area and went all the wayy up and left you would get a message saying the 'wolves were the other way'. I also had a sort of weird bug in the item shop with the event with Zaheer and Grimm, when I speeded up the text (after I had to restart and I didn't feel like reading it all over again), I would get stuck if the text would end before the characters were in the right position. (This one was my fault but just thought to mention)
Another thing, in the other town (with the library, can't remember the name). In one of the houses there was an old man saying 'help' way before the orcs invaded. XD
Oh and the shop npc, not sure if it was supposed to be that way, but I couldn't interact with them in front of the counters. I had to go around the counters and then interact with them from the back to get them to open the shop window. I noticed this in pretty much all shop/gem/inn npcs.
Overall: I LOVE IT! The game was really good. I got caught up in the story so bad! I didn't even notice the time as I was playing. I'm not sure if the game is completely finished, but I hope so. I really wanna know if we are able to save Grimm at the end! >_< (I'll be keeping an eye out for any updates you might release for the game. And ofc to any new games in this series you might make! I'm really liking this game world of yours!) Good luck in the contest!! ♥