I absolutely like the wall of text: like I've said elsewhere, feedback helps a lot, and I appreciate people taking the time to share.
I spent a lot of time considering appeal. pricing etc, and still will. I agree that it would be a bad idea to make this one a hard charge, and I don't plan to. To clarify, overall I'm taking a full game, chopping it into five pieces, and releasing them as they're finished. The first piece, this one, will probably always be free, and serve as a demo/intro to let people get a taste. The others will be a small hard charge. When/if it's complete, I'll probably bundle them all together for convenience. I think this stands a good chance of working, but it's impossible to know until Mission/chapter 2 is out.
I've had over a decade of watching artists struggle with how to monetize their work in a way that was sustainable and didn't alienate fans. Two decades really, got in around 2000. I'm old enough to remember artist bragging about wild invisible watermark schemes and other nonsense, long before Patreon. So many artists make the mistake of either undervaluing their fans, failing to put themselves on the other end and see how it feels, or the mistake of undervaluing themselves and underpricing/underpromoting their stuff because they don't want to make waves. One thing I've learned is that you can never make everyone happy: someone will start complaining the moment you charge ANYTHING, which is somewhat understandable. But it's a balance. You want to hit something that's reasonable for most of the people interested in your work, and for you. It's a tricky process, but I'm trying to approach it with the right balance of humility and self-respect. We'll see how it goes.
And glad you're enjoying the writing! It's always kind of boggled me that the writing is so bad in these games, because to me that's the one easy part of all of it. This game took 7 months to make. The writing was...maybe a week all condensed? But people obviously have different skill sets. I'm glad I had another opportunity to write some fun stuff for the game (and I'm actually still slightly tweaking it as I playtest; no "lore" changes, just phrasing and stuff).