The demo said roughly half an hour and that was accurate for me - landed in Grub Heap just under 30 mins.
On the whole, really love the concept of slow travel and the idea that you can basically always see the goal but getting there itself is the puzzle. Was a big fan of Sunless Sea and Myst-likes so there's always room in my heart for plodding, atmospheric travel and I can't wait for things like sound effects and such to be added later.
Things I noticed in the game itself:
- WASD didn't work a couple times returning out of the periscope. You could look around but not move - if you click on the map table and then exit that, you're free again.
- The world sort of jumps occasionally, some sort of engine tile loading for the big map maybe? The smoke streams are misplaced sometimes, as if the entire island shifted over a bit. One of these jumps my player character ended up on top of the balloon's rigging, so I walked forward and fell back into the basket where you're supposed to be.
- There's sort of a weird UI where the booklet is numbered F1-F5 but the tooltips just beside it only go to F4, and they're slightly mismatched.
More subjective design elements:
I like the ruin exploration too, that seems like it has a lot of potential to sort of have different types of island or cool / interesting differences between them, really add to the variation and wonderment of your lonely travels. I mentioned Sunless Sea and feel like that might have some nice influences.
Maybe I was playing the wrong way, but I started mapping out the winds with the pegs and the clues and then sort of just flew into the air to test things out - I think I only placed five pins or something before just winging it. Not sure if that's worth noting as a punishable or encouraged gameplay style
Maybe it's a balloon piloting skill thing, but I felt like sometimes I was running forever across an island on foot to get to the ruin. Not sure if that's something to be fixed by more terrain / props / etc or maybe some sort of thing were you can drive the basket around while landed like a weird car. I don't know.
The red handle makes intuitive sense in that it's opposite the fire handle but also it's generally hard to see the cause / effect of the flaps opening unless you're specifically looking up / generally know what it should be doing. Sound effects will likely help this.
The variometer can go so green that it ends up back red, which is both accurate and also confusing to glance away and back at if you're not noting it in your head.
The ramp of which layer wind you're in could be a little more forgiving - if you're coming down for a landing and you have speed but drop below 100 you just stop that direction and drop straight down instead of this intuitive arc. It makes sense at a programatic level, but maybe there's some generous momentum or something in those instances.
But, I really liked it and I think it'll be lovely as it develops more