A lot of promising prospects, here. A lot of work is needed, however.
Firstly, you need to set the boundaries of personalisation: Whilst we are playing as a set character, rather than as a projection of ourselves or someone created wholly by the user, the player needs to have some control over the nature and aspects of the PC, in order to properly engage with them, I think. Setting gender, appearance, name, sexuality, et cetera, is all well and good, but you need to make *some* aspects dependant upon personal choice, too.
Secondly, I think you need to structure the plotline better. It seems to drag out certain aspects, rush through others, and be far too linear. Getting both the pacing, and the branching sorted will do wonders for your game.
Examples for the former point are, for the most part, twofold:
One being the amount of time spent at the start saying “Do you want to talk to X?” followed by a few small remarks, which should be shortened to “Pick who you want to talk to?”, as well as how much you wish to say to them. Saying “Hello” in passing to one chap might then allow you to have a proper conversation with another, and not force the player to address each person in turn. It got a little boring, doing that.
The other point is that your journey seems to be rushed. There is no time spent preparing, setting up your aspects and equipment, allocating tasks to people, etc.; Instead, you set off quickly on a very railroaded journey, which jumps from one event to another. I would like to take things a little more slowly, and appreciate the progress, with more branches to explore. It doesn’t have to be sandboxed, it just needs to be not-so-linear.
This all ties to the general point of making the players choices more consequential. I never felt, at any point, that I was in any risk. It seemed like the game was proceeded without the player being a necessary component.
Furthermore, flesh out the supporting characters, a little more. They all just seem to be dropped into the game, rather than woven into it.
And when someone asks me what I think of India, I would appreciate being able to reply along the lines of “It’s a disobedient and primitive land, full of spiced food and stomach bugs.”
