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Ok, it's been a few days, and I've come to some reflections. Actually, this might read somewhat as a reiteration of what others have already said, but nevertheless:
Oh Glob! The Grinding
At the start, I was content to dabble in storylets in a undirected fashion. But after a while that wasn't enough and I set myself some longer term goals. I decided that I'd like to go to university, and for that I needed higher watchfulness. It was then that I discovered that ventures require you to repeat the same storylets, sometimes upwards of a dozen times. This is not a good game design decision at all. If I have to reread the same content, I'll skim read. If I skim read once then I'll skim read again, and soon the whole reading experience is undermined.
Drip Feeding
At first I didn't mind the limited action points. But then I became invested in what I was doing. Now it's got to the point where I'll switch over to the Fallen London tab, play the action that I wanted to play 10 minutes earlier, and most of the time it won't be an action I'm actually interested in as it's only a means to some future end. This has the unfortunate consequence that most of my interactions with the game are marked by ambivalence and impatience.
Oh the Stuff!
I love all the dozens of different qualities and kinds of qualities the character can have, and the variety and varying intensity of these qualities helps flesh out the idea of the character. I have the most fun tinkering with inventory items, and selling things at the bazaar to buy other things so that I can unlock inventory-related actions. This is fun because it takes some thought, requires taking calculated risks (am I going to need these diamonds later? What about all this rostygold?), and there's a nice sense of pay-off when you get a fortunate result after juggling a whole load of resources, even if you just end up with a shed load of memories of distant shores that you can't do anything with yet.
Varying Contact Contacts
There are loads of different contacts that you can have, which is a great feature for making the game feel richer and larger. The downside is that, as poor luck would have it, I rarely have the right kinds of contacts for any given contacts-requiring storylet. Like, I've got Connected: the Duchess coming out of my ears, but I've yet to see a storylet that needs it. Also, the way in which I'm connected is very abstract. Like, I've clearly never actually met the Duchess, yet I've met loads of Bohemians, and both of these are very high connections for me. It really seems to be tracking reputations among certain groups and individuals rather than any interpersonal connection.
Gold In Them There Hills
Despite the frustrations, Fallen London is a compelling world, the writing is a constant draw and I really do want to uncover some of the many mysteries of the setting. More than that, when it becomes available, I'm seriously tempted in having a go at making a game with the Story Nexus toolset. Like the Varytale stories, I think there's a lot of mileage in this Quality-Based Narrative approach, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else comes out of it.
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