It pains me to give an indie game a negative review, and usually I just refrain from giving any in these cases, but I felt like for this specific game, it's better to actually mention publicly the issues it has so that people know what to expect.
This is a story that, in my opinion, really suffers from its short word count. Usually, my personal taste is to favor stories with 120k+ words, so this one is shorter than what I'd usually purchase, but despite my preferences, I had some good shorter experiences too, from time to time. Sadly it wasn't the case here. What I wanted to say is that the length of the story the game tells us isn't really too short, and isn't the culprit for the low word count. The problem comes from the lack of flavor text, which to me is a big issue in an interactive fiction like this one.
What I mean by lack of flavor text is simply that the game doesn't give enough lasting repercussions on what we make our MC to be. We get a lot of choices to shape their personality and world view, but when it comes to the narration, the MC remains a bit of a merciless pirate who gets angry at other characters at least internally, who lacks trust in others in some specific instances and what not. If it fits with your previous choices and how you made your MC, you were lucky and your character is in-character. If you made clear opposite choices on the other hand, you get to notice the continuity issues and just how little any of your decisions impacts the narration.
Now, don't get me wrong, this isn't a jab against semi-set protagonists. But this here didn't feel like a semi-set protagonist, but rather a protagonist meant to be fully customizable where the game didn't deliver on the customization.
Romance has also close to no impact on the scenes with whoever we chose to romance, and there are close to no proper interactions with the love interests. Adding to that the previous problem, and the relationships are very unsatisfying. For example, I was consistently picking options favoring one of the love interests, but every time when the MC wasn't just acting based on a direct choice I made, they were mistrustful of said character or angry at them and so on. Similarly, at the very start of the game, I made the decision for my MC to abandon the crew they were in up until that point, especially since said captain was described as being easily put in a bad mood and becoming violent when it happened, but at multiple points in the story after that I had scenes with my MC mourning the fact they left her and that she wasn't with them. I as a player saw that woman for only a few lines... it's already strange to have to make such an important decision so early on (if we leave her, she doesn't appear at all anymore), but there is also no reason at all for our MC to lament the fact she isn't there since we didn't even get to know her, and considering picking that choice at the start makes it so the MC dislikes her, there was no reason for that later on.
Another issue are the absurdly specific skill and personality checks at the end of the game. During the entire story, there are almost no skill checks, and those we have are very easy, but at the end, suddenly there's a crazy difficulty spike with not nearly enough flexibility to avoid death. I had to restart the entire game just to raise my MC's affinity with one of the love interests I was not invested in to an extremely high level just because the only way to succeed the final skill check without being a combat oriented or evil character was to have an insanely high trustworthiness (personality trait) + relationship with that one specific love interest combined, added to another personality trait (but on a more reasonable level). It's worth noting that I also think morality more than trustworthiness should have been checked, if this skill check was to be to begin with, considering this seems to be what said character values the most in the MC.
All in all, I feel this game would have benefited from less love interests that would have been more fleshed out, a LOT more flavor text, and more flexibility in the approaches for the final boss (or alternatively more variants to what is checked - for example it was such a missed opportunity to have that one specific character needed for the aforementionned skill check instead of just the one with the highest affinity being checked, no matter who it is).
I also had a few coding errors here and there, but that was reported and nothing was game breaking.
My ultimate opinion is that why I don't hate the game per se, I also can't in good faith recommend it, sadly.
