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Lovingly crafted, bittersweet tale. Short, but very memorable. Hits a lot of thoughts and memories for me -- but maybe that's a good thing.

Well it's probably a bit late for feedback at this point since ep3 is probably being worked on, but I only just recently gave it a shot so I thought I'd write a few words on the off-chance it helps.

Overall, I'm quite impressed. I tend to try a lot of these sorts of games, on COG and so on, though I find just as with books, if it doesn't stick in the first few chapters then a reader doesn't come back. While I don't tend to be a big fan of ones that start with the player as a kid, in this case it's just a short prologue and doesn't outstay its welcome. I possibly would have liked a bit more flavour on the various mentors; that seemed to just come and go with the result being dumped on you and the reader feeling a little unsure of the outcome. Maybe I was expecting a short scene with the player and the particular mentor here after that decision had been made. I suppose the idea is to fill out these mentors later in the story either with flashbacks or meeting them, but I felt like I could have used a little more something to form a connection with them. That's just a personal feeling though, and as I say, I have only played about to the end of ep1 so far.

I am also thankful for the prologue not being weighed down headfirst into lore. I have tried a bunch of COG type games where it goes straight into weird dialects and pages of history and it really turned me off. There is a lot of cursing in the dialogue which I'm not sure if it seemed a bit out of place or not, but I think I'm getting more used to it as I go on. I'm not quite sure why that jumped out at me, but it might just be that I wasn't expecting it given my own writing style :-)

On the actual gameplay front, I'm still scratching my head and will need to give this another go since I only played for 4 hours or so last night, but my immediate impression was that the balance felt off. This might be because I'm stupid or just unlucky. As I recall, I went deep into agility in the prologue, picking it twice, and perception once, with a human character. I believe my mentoring gave me perception and persuasion. This effectively meant I had good agility, decent perception and persuasion, and lousy strength. I got through what seemed to be most of the first episode and by the point where I went to bed I had done about 12-14 skill checks. Since I knew that I hadn't focussed on strength I always avoided those, but generally tried the others, especially if it was agility. Out of those 12-14 skill checks, I passed precisely zero of them. It's nice that failure is an option but I have to admit I did feel rather drained after all that. It can be fun to have a disaster game but I wasn't actually aiming for it this time. Again, perhaps I was unlucky or failed to understand something, but (somewhat obviously) it wasn't feeling like I was making much impact as a player because I seemingly couldn't pass anything. While I am loathe to start again (I like doing first playthroughs without any fore-knowledge) in this case I might just to try again and hope my character is less of an inept squib that continually gets bailed out by random people who end up hating them :D Perhaps being injured or tired or poorly equipped didn't help, but I had no coin to buy anything (since I failed that check), couldn't persuade anyone to give me anything (failed that too) and ended up wounded because of a fight (failed that as well). Maybe it's just meant to be hard, but it was a rather punishing first experience.

On the map I'd like a note or a tool-tip that reminds me of what major objective or character is at each place. It would just be a bit of help to the player and make the flow of the game a bit stronger. Maybe I should be making hand-written notes or something but my excuse is that it was late at night.

I am quite hopeful for this project as a whole. I've just written about a 500k story over the past couple years myself and that's not interactive so I can appreciate the effort that has gone into the project here. I would say the writing is of a higher standard than I was expecting given my past experience with these sorts of titles and the setting seemed grounded and one that I could adjust into quite quickly. I will certainly be very interested to see where this goes.