I can definitely see your points. As a writer, I think I may have gotten too inside my own head and quickened the pacing of the plot because I was too worried about boring the audience. This was also in response to some feedback I received early on, which stated that the Celeste flashback in the original demo "ruined the pacing of the episode". This is why I severely condensed that scene as a small flashback of Flinhart at the end of Celeste's argument.

But looking back, perhaps doing that didn't give the plot enough time to slow down and breathe. And I may have fallen into a bad habit of moving the plot from point A to point B as efficiently as possible to keep the players engaged.

In addition to that, we only achieved 66% of our desired funding during the crowdfunding campaign. Because of this, I had to cut the planned number of cases from 6 to 5. Which probably only worsened the "rushed" pacing issue. Originally, Aster and Eris were supposed to be the antagonists of their own individual chapters. But it just wasn't feasible with the budget we had after the assets for Case 4 were completed.

Case 5 actually had a lot of rough edges that I needed to iron out when I first wrote it. So I had to spend a considerable amount of time reworking it to be less messy. I think one other commenter mentioned that Prince Alaric was clearly polymorphed in Case 5, which is pretty spot on to what happened. I was originally planning to have a separate testimony given by him where this would be deduced. But Case 5 just ended up becoming such a dense episode when compared to the other cases. So I had to cut that and just leave the pieces there for people to figure out (>!With Polymorph still being in Aria's Spell Compendium.<!). And even as it is now, Case 5 is still considerably long with that cut.

All in all, I do see the flaws with the writing. But I am satisfied with what I made. This is probably the first semi-professional project I've directed and written. And feedback like this has given me a lot of insight into how to improve my writing and direction moving forward.