The manual in the beginning was a really fun way to set the scene and really sold the story! However, it wasn't the best way to teach the controls, I had to keep coming back to it, which meant restarting the game because I had a hard time figuring out what did what.
Great concept and I can see that there has been a lot of thought behind everything, just needs some polish and maybe a bit more hand-holding when teaching how everything works :)