I'm interested in what happened to the protagonist, and the prospect of choosing whether to dredge up that history or not! I wonder if players will actually have much of a choice, or perhaps the story will call for that past to come back and haunt them? Either way would be cool!
However, there was quite a bit of text (several minutes of it) and I did find myself skipping through once I felt like I got the gist of it. Many players will do this when there is lots of text and they may end up missing important information. My suggestion here is to drastically cut down on the amount of talking there is, and focus solely on the most important and most interesting or profound bits. This goes for the scrolling text, as well. It was a lot and was quite overwhelming, I definitely only skimmed it.
On the bright side, I really like the concept of the Red Zone! It would just be nice to have bits of info about it fed to us through gameplay, rather than dumping it all out in the intro. The intro should be a time to get players hooked with story, action, or other things like art or unique mechanics, and not get bogged down by what I like to call "history lessons". You have a great hook that's like a diamond in the rough (that being, the character's current situation and the general gist of where they're going). Just need to sand off those edges (that being, all the specific details of exactly what the Red Zone is and such that isn't 100% important to know immediately, and is kind of boring when we have no context yet, but might be more interesting later)... and then spoonfeed that "sanded off" information back to us in smaller doses throughout the game. I think walking around and talking to NPCs is a great way to dispense bits of information like that. For example, in my game I have a whole city where two humanoid races reside, and there's a lot of racial tension between them. The effects of this come into play in the relevant story arc, but all the background, details, and worldbuilding as to why this is the case comes in the form of talking to the NPCs. If a player doesn't talk to NPCs and misses out on the context, and by extension richness/nuance, then so be it. I like to think of it as a little treat for those who take the time to interact and form a fuller picture of the world for themselves.
Anyway, I'm ALWAYS finding myself having to cut dialogue out of my game. I still go back to the earliest stages and look or long-running dialogues where I can just chop, chop, chop as much as I can but still have the key info, as well as just enough flair to show character personalities, but not so much that it's overbearing. It's haaaaaaaard, and sometimes it hurts to cut dialogue I thought was so clever at the time, but now see that it's just hurting the flow/pace of the game. Because the point is... I don't want people to skip through it!
If I can find a way to follow your progress I will! But I'm new to this forum so I'm not sure how I would do that lol.
