Alright, so, some thoughts.
First of all, I’m very impressed by the quality of the writing in general. Your prose is evocative and immersive. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the parts where you parallel Choice of the Deathless are the weakest sections of the game. (Part of this is because I played that game very recently, so seeing parts that mirror it very closely in your story is rather jarring) In my opinion, the further you stray from the framework CoD provides, the better your writing is. Some of it isn’t a big deal; the Academy in general is fine, and upon replays, even the stat selection works. But at certain points, your trying to work in CoD’s style is deeply awkward. The final interview/promotion at the end of the story is one example, the scene where you face off against your final opponent and have an extremely similar choice/framing of that choice on how to deal with him is another. In fact, the whole frame story of the shattered-mirror-self/rebuilding is like that.
On another topic, I really felt your characters, particular the MC’s childhood friends and Glass (I wasn’t really a Charlie fan), were extremely well-developed. Interactions with them seemed meaningful and unique, though I wish we had more than a few lines with them when they came with us or in romance scenes. On the other hand, some were less so. The two knights and queens seemed basically interchangeable, and I felt the story would have benefited from having greater interaction with at least the knights. Of course, I realize that may have been intentional, but it was kind of strange.
Some choices also felt less meaningful than they could have been. For example, in the beginning, when you get offers from one or both Courts, you’re told about how excellent (or not) each offer is, and yet this has exactly zero further gameplay impact. You don’t get paid more. You don’t actually command or take commands from different people. Speaking of paying for things, the way the debt works in this game also confuses me, because we seem to have separate wealth and whatever is used to track paying-off-debt-money values–in fact, wealth doesn’t seem to have any purpose at all.
That reminds me: The stat screen is awfully bare. I understand why we can’t see some hidden values, but why can’t we see wealth, or patience, or loyalty, or so on? Why can we see some relationships, but not those of the knights, courts, or clans?
Speaking of clans…they could have used more fleshing-out. I’m still not sure what they do, and not in a good way. And given that we have so many (potential) interactions with Miles, it’s weird that we never actually learn anything about him. His final “face”-heel turn really comes out of left field (or it would, if he wasn’t an obvious Smith parallel. Smith worked because we really didn’t know him, but we find Miles’ notes, we see his experiments, we talk (too-briefly, really) about motivation. He just feels not quite mysterious enough to be sinister and not quite developed enough to be, well, anything. While we’re on this topic, the fact that nothing really came of keeping his notes is kind of annoying; I would have liked a high-cleverness option to work through them or try something ourselves, or hand them over to someone else.
As for other choices I found unsatisfying: Though I really did like the scene where our opposite-court friend was captured, particularly the part where we could tail them to save them and the mission, the one thing that struck me was that the option to torture them…was just that. No reasoning, no afterwards “so why did you do that” that would allow the MC to define their motives, and because of that lack, the choice felt abrupt and hollow.
The choice of a Court, too, wasn’t particularly impactful, because other than a few bits of flavor text and inverted morality-court bonuses, nothing changed. There was no unique mission or character that really got more than a few lines depending on where you go.
I will be watching this with interest, and will probably have more comments later.
Edit: Actually, one more thing: One thing that stood out to me was how much in the dark the MC was, the entire time. Even as you rise in importance, you still basically don’t really know what’s going on or why. There’s no opportunity for a particularly clever or well-connected character to put some pieces together and unravel part of the deeper scheme, or even minor parts of it. That was frustrating, and made me feel like the MC lacked agency. That might have been intentional to an extent, but I still felt jerked in various directions with literally no way to change things.