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(Copied from my review of the VN. Apologies if you've already read this)

My impression of the first build is that it is long. It is very long. My friend calculated the word count as almost 100,000 words, which is already the length of a full novel. In and of itself, that's not a bad thing, but to set the majority of that time in exactly one room makes the VN unbearably slow-paced, especially when most of that time is spent in almost interminably long monologues of the main char continually asking, "Where am I? What's going to happen to me?" and repetitive character interactions (seriously, how many times must we read about Marruk being an asshole to the main char until the reader says, "Okay, Marruk is an asshole! We get it!"?). And after all of that, we still have no idea of what the main conflict of the story will be, so it feels as if nothing significant has happened yet.

If I had a suggestion, it's this: the length needs to be cut down drastically. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the VN would be twice as effective at only half the length. So what would I recommend cutting? Well, the monologues don't need to be as long and there don't need to be so many extraneous interactions with the other chars (did we, for example, need two different scenes where the main char describes his love of curry?). More specifically, cut anything out that isn't immediately relevant to the current situation. Information can always be revealed to the reader at a later point in the story. But it's not all bad though. All of the main chars have distinct personalities and clearly indicate that they have more depth to them than they are currently letting on, and that's intriguing. But without any sense of what the main conflict of the story will be, I'm not getting a sense of how each character will be uniquely suited to solving the problems that the main char may have. Still, after finally getting through the intro, I am interested in seeing how the main char's relationship with the char on the chosen path will develop. But if I have to tell people that they have to wade through an almost insufferably long, slow-paced intro before they get to the interesting parts, they're most likely going to conclude that it's not worth their time.