Some impressions (spoilers)

[lancelot]

For now I stopped playing at the glass permeability ritual; not sure I will continue. The logic of the gameplay too often goes like this: I have this formula; let's check if I have all the ingredients; I do, so the next step is brewing that potion. Why? I have no idea. Where is it going to be used? I have no idea. If it's a ritual related to glass/lead/metals, I just have to start remembering where I saw something made of the same material. It's the adventure game version of the cart before the horse.

And it does get tedious to first examine everything through the oculus, then examine everything through the lens, then try to find something that has the association that you need. Or to learn by trial and error that elemental earth doesn't have the earthy association.

It's quite impressive how the game keeps track of the dependencies and also how it can autocomplete a command, but at least in one instance it outsmarts itself. I was trying to ignite the blackwood; I was standing in the Burning Hall and did "ignite blackwood", hoping that maybe in the hall it would work. And the game interpreted it as "ignite blackwood with winter-oak". I suppose it happened because the winter-oak already was ignited, because that did happen automatically in the hall. But the game knew that now the winter-oak could be used to ignite the blackwood, and I didn't. So I discovered the solution just by accident; still don't know how I was supposed to figure it out.

And there are a few annoyances with the interpreter that I guess are unavoidable in a text adventure. I think in the Garden Pool "remove mud" should have worked, because "clean slab" did pretty much exactly that (I think there even was the word "remove" in the response).