After the really excellent v1-14, I thought this one missed the mark in a couple of ways. First, there was a lot of writing that was unnecessary. We really didn't need the second "coyote walk" because it was not much different than the first one. Crush could have summarized it in a line. That was true for a lot of the bar scenes in this update - just say that "the night went on much like Monday until..." and then describe the new event (like the naked wrestling). But, when describing the unique scenes, Crush needed to put a lot more flavor into the writing, like he did in 1-14. Most of the bar writing is longer than it needs to be to just say what is happening, but drier than it needs to be to be really interesting for the reader. As someone suggested above, the story needed a lot more inner voice about submitting to Conner.
I agree with the argument that our agent is "getting into this" sexually a little fast, even if she is an exhibitionist or whatever. HCC should be a very scary place to work for her, given what she knows of its owners and managers. More work days with less description of each day could get her to the point where she is somewhat inured to the danger, with no more writig than we have now.
The break-in was the best part of the episode. Lots of inner voice stuff, writing for the senses, appeals to emotion, and interesting technical detail. Someone asked above why the break-in was undertaken like "a cross-border operation," but the story makes it clear that these guys are in tight with Bangkok organized crime, so this was a potentially very violent operation. It made sense to be prepared for major opposition.
But the complaint that there are not meaningful choices here is actually an unfair one, since we knew going in that this whole series of episodes were just the setup for the choice-making portion of the game, and adding meaningful choices at this point would just slow down the progress on story development. It's a bit ironic that people simultaneously complain that he isn't slowing the story down by giving the player meaningful choices and thus creating multiple branches to be written before the story can advance, and also complain that the story is moving too slowly!
I have encouraged Crush to keep writing this story free of meaningful choices until he gets to the end, and then come back and add choices and branches. There are games here with little meaningful choice that do quite well (see, for instance, Divergence, Beyond the Singularity) and many, many abandoned stories that had too many "meaningful choices" and thus so many branches that the developer's moral broke when contemplating how complicated finishing the story would be.
Criticisms of the pace of writing are well-founded, I think, but the pace of Crush's writing is what it is. It's not like he can be criticized for suddenly slowing down. Those for whom the pace is unbearably slow should just forget about the game for a couple of years, because the pace doesn't look like it is going to change.
