Hello!  So far your atmosphere and storytelling are quiet excellent.

I am getting used to the pixel are style and it's used effectively, especially when considering the setup of how you've established the way the world is viewed through the outdated materials in Rook's head :)

So far I have made it to the ladder and shot the pieces out, and I had to exit the game to find out the controls of the gun.  I am not a fan of handholding and like how things are revealed so far, and I assume the control menu is going to be added later.  I also assume you'll have a tutorial hint for the Alt button being gun control once you get it, which will also solve that problem.  When I saw the gun had precision aim to the mouse I was ecstatic.  

My only suggestion based on what I've seen so far:  While I understand the element of being interrupted by Jin and LUCI during the thug confrontation, the dialogue ends up coming rapid-fire.  I'm used to Planescape: Torment, so it wasn't an issue for me, but this early it made me remove from the atmosphere being a bit confused, and actually miss dialogue because I started seeing if I was meant to make a selection or not before selections were obvious.  So for the interruption method of storytelling, or it happening in his head, I'd recommend exploring an idea of a different color dialogue box, potentially adjusting the timing of the appearance of the boxes, and you already have the excellent effects for his frazzled mind, so potentially a subtle effect for mental communication vs spoken dialogue to grant a visual cue for the player.

At this stage I'm stuck with the ladder half-down, and no command I can think of is giving me further movement, so I assume that's the current alpha state.  If I'm missing something, it wasn't something I was able to figure out with the current tools I had figured out thus far.

...although  that did cause me to run off the edge of the walkway, and my first thought was "Lots of people are gonna die here" :)  My second thought was 'if that was intentional, that's actually a brilliant way to 'burn the player's hand on the stove' so to speak.'  No nonsense way to prove you have to be careful especially after a save point.  Although a bit of a visual hint that it does end would help, like some higher contrast.  It blended into the background so looked like it continued to the right.

This one's gonna be a beauty.

"At this stage I'm stuck with the ladder half-down, and no command I can think of is giving me further movement"

If you ran off the edge, I assume you've already fiddled with raising/lowering the prisoner blocks a bit. Fiddle some more :)

Awesome feedback, thanks for all the input! Some thoughts:

- We're definitely trying to err on the side of too little rather than too much hand holding, but of course there's a thin line to walk between respecting the player and totally frustrating them, so we're listening closely for how common certain problems are to adjust balance for subsequent builds.

- We've gotten consistent feedback that the black narration boxes/dialogue options are not appealing, and I agree. The confusion because of the lack of visual contrast between narration and active choices is also majorly problematic. It's near the top of the list of priorities to begin testing alternatives for both, and to make them clearly different so the dialogue selection interface is more aesthetically interesting and more clearly presented.

- As for the ladder puzzle, there's definitely a solution, and like Cheeseness mentioned it requires some backtracking downstairs.