The story is told well and is interesting, but there are technical problems. It's good to be an innovator, but only if you understand the development environment. This means that abandoning the standard interface was a mistake.
As one of the commentators correctly pointed out, the change of images and the text speed are too slow. The useless prologue, even without the newly introduced battle, lasted an excruciating 5 minutes. What is really missing is full loading with a second click, which allows you to skip spectacular but long animations. Also, a skip button wouldn't hurt. Especially if you remember the little-known function: “Skip to the nearest dialogue choice.”
The idea of permanent death was a failure. With such slow movement through dialogues, the last thing you want is to replay a section or the entire game from the beginning due to insufficiently frequent saves.
In general, the whole idea of combat needs to be changed. Even basic rats, not to mention more difficult enemies, are difficult to overcome. Random and “inevitable” (spawned on top of the "move to the next room" button) battles exhaust the group even on the way to the objective. A person who would walk through a rat cave without using cheats would evoke a mixture of respect and fear in me.
At the same time, artistically the game is very well done. Solid 8.5/10. The dialogue is a joy to read and the H-scenes are a treat to the eye. The problem is the ratio of an excessive amount of (as slow as the dialogue) combat with only a few minutes of targeted content.
This project has great potential, but due to the general slowness, half of the players will not wait until the first scene and another 40% will not last until the second. Ones this will be fixed, the game awaits the success of the 4 elements trainer.
I hope the project will receive further updates, because it is worthy. Keep it up. Good luck.