[0.0.5] It's hard to rate this game so early; I'll try my best,
There is the big problem -- it is a game that attempts to do a very difficult thing: many story branches, with continuations. We, collectively, know from experience that this seldom works out.
The number of branches grows geometrically with story progression, unless counter-measures are taken. Large teams can use methods like procedural content generation from pseudo random numbers (or heck, even LLN/ai NPCs). But a small team will struggle -- the game experiences a kind of heat death, where the efforts are spread thin across dozens of branches.
In the version that I played, there was a choice with three options in the beginning section. As far as I could see, no hints were provided about what may work or not. It was not a riddle to get right. One option just was aritrarily correct and the others bad ends; pick a pipe. The bad ends were not interesting and contained no images. This is an unpleasant but common thing for games that try to do frequent branching.
Some games use a point system for personality traits, and every interaction molds your character. This changes how the events play out. In some cases branching of the story becomes necessary, but the number must stay very low (e.g. 2) for it to be workable. They create scene variations.
Some games have a main loop, which makes the world seem richer, as you can reuse lots of scenery, but have slightly different things happen there.
Games that have early diverging paths create so much work that most branches become stale at some point. The danger is that your play-through resembles a maze-solving task: your objective is to find the longest path that the dev(s) has/have worked on. The decisions are not "what would I do?", nor "what would this character do?" it becomes: "what did the devs work on?"
Hopefully, this game succeeds and the number of branches remains low. But, the early dead ends are worrying (or even the existence of dead/bad ends). This is not at all mandatory, bad ends are not required to exist. They only contribute to the plot if there is suspense and if there is skill involved in making the right decisions.
I can see this go either way.
