I'm not a connoisseur of gamebooks, but I think this one is on the simpler side—complex enough to be engaging for a few hours, not an epic "whoa I'm gonna need more notepaper" kind of thing.  At the very end of the game, I was starting to wish there were a little more variety in random encounters (which I guess means that the level of variance is pretty well-matched to the scale of the game). 

In a short time and confined space, the game does manage to feel like a Metroid game, not only in collecting upgrades to squish aliens, not only in piecing together alien lore and federation logs, but in the sense of exploration, the feeling of "oooh, I think something is hidden here!" I think the amount of mechanical complexity is very well-tuned to suit this purpose. Making missiles and bombs use the same resource, for example, is a very smart choice. The system of spare tanks is really clever as well.

I found the rules to be a little underdefined in a couple places. If I use a bomb to open a cache that refills a tank, and I don't have any tanks yet, is the effect wasted? Can I come back and get it later, and if so, do I have to use another bomb to open it again? Can I use a cache more than once? (I don't think there are any "use missiles to pass this door" connections that I'd want to pass through twice, but if I did, would I need to use more missiles?)

There's one confusing bit that I think must be a "bug": The Game Over rules say if I reach 0 EP, I go back to the starting room with "half my current EP" (which should always be 0), but the effect in the starting room says I refill to max EP anyway. There's no connection back to the starting room from page 11, so the only way to get back to my ship to heal up is by dying, I think? It looks like a couple different philosophies of how healing should work are overlapping.

Thank you for making this!!!