This is overall a solid stealth/maze game. I just have a few issues:
- You can just walk past the guards in the intro sequence and proceed on your merry way. Short story indeed! :-p
- When you get caught by a guard, you go back to the beginning of the maze. This makes sense in the context of the story, but I have found that backtracking is SUPER FRUSTRATING, especially when it happens repeatedly.
- The combination lock is frustrating. Move the clues to the beginning of the game so the player knows what to look for and not have to backtrack through the entire game and hope that they got all of the clues right. You might even consider doing a different set of clues, but that might be me being lazy, too.
Backtracking is really the biggest weakness here; without checkpoints, it means going over mazes that you have cleared multiple times, which gets old fast. The combination lock is what finally did it for me; while it could be argued that you could just save after each maze and reload after being caught for any other incident, having to go over the ENITRE game again, trying to avoid the guards, then hoping you've seen all of the clues. I quit the game at that point because it's not enjoyable.
Criticisms aside, this game is decently designed; the mazes aren't too long, finding items was fun and fair, and the story bits never overstayed their welcome. If you can find a way to reduce the backtracking and make the combination lock part less of a chore, you'll have an outstanding game!