COMBAT DONE
As a turn-based battle and dungeon crawling enthusiast... I appreciate what the game seems to be going for. I made sure I visited every available event and menu screen. I really liked the dialog system; it's easily the highlight of the demo. Bro, the hypertext-based lore popups? As I don't play AAA games made after 2010 -- one of them certainly must have implemented something like this since then -- this is officially the first time I get to witness this personally, on my own rig. It's such an incidental little detail but it goes a long way. Nice call on including it. Being able to chat up the crewmates from the menu is absolutely neat and has unlimited potential too.
Unfortunately, the severe UX issues detract from the experience. Accessing the option screen from the main menu locks you in there unless the return button is at a certain position on the screen. The battle system... whew. Trying to click every single interactable object in sight got me farther than trying to follow the tutorial; it's not too helpful as is. I figured some stuff out, such as moving characters between sectors. I figured out that only red skills damage the enemy, which apparently leaves some of the characters as pure support units/sitting ducks. Is it a good idea having a sole character with 100 HP and the rest at 10 HP, dying in a few hits and unable to kill enemies (this is more of a balancing issue, but it's greatly amplified by the UX)? How do I revive my dead teammates (there seemed to be an option to do this on a certain screen on a certain town, but I think I needed money, which I never made in the entire demo)? What do any of the items do (I still don't know, but I enjoyed looting them on the dungeon)? HP values on the characters currently go below 0, by the way. I won two battles (apparently) but it did leave me confused and my JRPG itch unscratched. All of the other battles? COMBAT DONE. Implementing a battle log, I think, would be enough to clue the player in on what the h*ck is going on without having to change too much from the way things are now, but I believe things need to change from the way they are now. I say this as someone who despises casul handholding.
Finally, I liked the dungeon crawling system too, but the UX issues followed the team in. I wish I could access the menu and heal fallen allies, or understand what was going on with the lockpick system. Having no apparent button to close the lockpick and loot interfaces forces us to figure out that we have to click the left third of the screen by ourselves; this could be handled better.
Aesthetics: I like the art and the character designs. Very bande dessinée. Music was OK as a placeholder. Please revise the game's script. I would also suggest making buttons/clickable interfaces more obvious.
TL;DR: the only thing that needs to be improved ASAP is the UX. The rest is pretty solid.
Playthrough: 30+ minutes. Got to the "Demo done... for now" screen (which softlocks the game)