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I actually agree 100% with everything you mentioned.  You worded all my issues much better than I could have!  After catching up with the current build in one sitting like you did, I walked away with the same feeling of "I want more, but conflicted."

There was just one other thing that I felt should be brought up.  The MC reaction to beastmen.  He admits he has like zero experience of how the "real world" reacts to things.  Its the whole point of him going out of his home town.  However he has this deep rooted fear that all beastmen, except for the ones in his town, are completely hostile to humans.  He admits nothing really happens to his town because it was so isolated.  Yet somehow he has this impression beastmen just continue to raid and pillage human settlements.  If his own personal experience with beastmen were those that were non-violent and even likeable in his hometown, when he first meets a beastmen that is of the same mindset (Val)... why is he so distrustful and really an ass to him?  Yes the bandit scene happens before hand and thus roots the fear in, but I feel like that shouldn't have been enough to overwrite his own personal experience when meeting his only second person outside of his town.  First one is the bandit, second Val.  Val being the good guy that aligned with his own experiences... I feel like he wouldn't be so distrustful to have run away?  I mean carried him away by basically bridal style run through the forests, hunts him dinner, takes first watch, and listened to and accepted any requests from the MC.  That is like soap opera material that would have been flooded with a bunch of meme's saying "I'd ship that".

Something like both interactions with the bandit happens in 1 sitting.  before Val takes the MC too far he struggles with being held gets let go and runs away from Val only to run into the bandit who's still chasing them.  After that then the campfire scene happens.  Granted the MC would be very injured at this point, it would give the story a location on when Val patched up his injuries.  It was glossed over with the interaction in the inn, but its mentioned Val did a lot of the patching up and the innkeeper took over from there.  The concussion could explain the lack of memories and possible distrust still of Val.  But like you said the first 3 chapters were almost rushed.

Now excuse my wall of text as I tried to explain my thinking.  I ended up loving the story so I stayed to the end and eagerly wait for more.  Such an interesting take of the "human lost in a world of beastmen" genre.  What started that fear?  It sounded like the MC expected the world to be most human civilization with his deep fear of interacting with beastmen?  Since why would he leave the town if he expects all beastmen outside of a few to be so aggressive?  He must have expected all major cities etc to be mostly human?

(+1)

As I said in my OP, the start of the game, especially build 1, felt like a template of a story that the creator wanted to tell. But released it before they sat down and fleshed out the whats whos and whies.

Which lead to the stuff I've commented above and the issue you mentioned as well.

Rotshild said that there is a good chance of a rewrite/fleshing out happening for the start of the game so now we can only hope. That would be a good thing mostly for their sake. Not everyone is gonna stick around with a story if the intro is not that interesting and has glaring issues. The promise of it being better later is not enough for everyone.

I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but my assumption is that TTOF is a mix of a passion project and a learning experience for the dev(s). They are passionate about the story they want to tell, but also use it as "go with the flow and learn along the way". I mean, they are not even sure yet if the story will have multiple endings or not.

Reading their responses to various comments they seem to be very respectful and capable of taking in both the positive and the negative feedback to improve the game. I even joined their Discord to report the bugs I've seen and was informed that they were swiftly resolved.

Based on that I think the project is in good hands and it'll get refined and improved as they go along. We all have to start somewhere. If they use TTOF to practice this format of storytelling, then so be it. That only means their potential next game will start much better.