Okay, I went through the whole thing. It definitely feels like a game that deserves to be even bigger than it already is. Plenty of good writing in there, though some parts did feel like they squeezed too much plot into too little space. The moment right after contacting HQ in particular seemed to have a lot of personal stuff and intergalactic politics mixed together very rapidly. Didn't always feel natural, and some of it was deliberately invoked by the meta-videogamey theme which I enjoyed, though it wasn't always as clear cut. There were a few parts I felt like I would've written differently, but those are just details. The story as a whole is great.
(I just replayed with a different path, and found something that feels like it crosses the line from odd phrasing to an outright error. A phrase "BoredAlien" shows up, differently capitalized and punctuated. It would've been an appropriate deliberate placeholder at the start, but it wasn't used anywhere else, and at that point it seemed less apt than ever.)
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Hello! Thank you for all this feedback :>
I totally hear you on the final Act, I wish I'd have more time to work it a bit more and have the player-character spend more time with the crew and go through the changes they are going through. I agree I use the meta-videogamey stuff quite often to justify character reasonings but it has been an ever-evolving balance throughout writing (in the first versions it was VERY meta and we wanted to tone it down) and some readers found it resonated well with and commented well on the "Follower mentality" npc follwoers might have in these kinds of games. But yeah I hear you! I often see big and reduce the scope along the way, and this project bears several traces of that.
Regarding using images in Twine, I thought about it but in the remaining time we had (very little, since we realized late that we wouldn't have the full game in Unity) I had to focus first and foremost on the written experience and making sure all variables would work well. I'll think about it for future works! (And will also look into Ren'Py for more visually appealing projects)
I'm happy you enjoyed the story as a whole in the end :> Thanks for playing it!
(I corrected the typo you found, indeed it was a relic of the "non-Twine" script that was used by the programmer :) Thanks!)