I've managed to find the beach "hooray!"..
A small criticism - I've been disappointed with the outcomes of achieving an objective. For example, you finally get to look in the basement to find nothing that's of any immediate use.. I would've thought it would be an ideal place to find the thing that could open the diary or something else I already know about, instead of just setting me off on another wild goose chase. The same went for fighting off the sharks.. Particularly annoying when these crop up in the middle of trying to achieve a totally different objective.
A few observations:
If a certain XP level is required to achieve objectives then please make that clear. It would be good to have some idea of the order in which objectives should be completed.
I'm also unclear as to the difference between the "Henchmen" (but not THE henchman) encountered on the street and the "Agents".. Approaching both seems to have the same effect. Although when they first appeared, the Agents seemed such an obvious trap, I avoided them, as per the instructions.
On the subject of THE Henchman: Surely he should have a different title? A henchman is a subordinate, the guy who does the dirty work or acts as a bosses bodyguard (like Goldfinger's "Oddjob"). At least make this guy the "Senior Henchman" or something so he's never confused with all the ordinary Henchmen.
I've noticed as the game progresses people I could once interact with now don't respond - presumably because I've completed that strand of the game and they've nothing left to offer. In such a large landscape it would be better if the characters we removed (or at least their tags disabled) when their part in the game is over.
A similar thing applies to Strangers: Why are they here? I've been ignoring them after the first 7 or 8 times but I'm not sure if that's the right thing to do... Is there one Stranger who is useful if you happen to approach him/her at exactly the right time? You will not be very popular if that turns out to be the case. Please give a tag only to the characters that lead to an interaction and either remove or disable the "Stranger" tags altogether or, for a quicker fix, make a clear statement at the start that Strangers play no actual part so players know they will be wasting their time by chasing after them.
I note your earlier comment that you're planning to open this up a great deal more. From what I've seen so far this would be very welcome but I suggest that you follow Shark's and the "Star Wars" movie method of concentrating on one or two plots at a time and introduce the new locations, etc, as a whole new game. Each instalment could include all the old locations and start at the point the previous game ended (and the same player stats) with a clue or a message arriving at "Home", meaning you can revisit exisiting locations to find out new stuff as well as opening up the new places... Trying to cram everything into one game would only increase the development time, become over-complicated, be much more difficult to test and risk the possibility of never having a finished game for people to play.
I'll be very interested to see the finished product as the game so far has a lot of promise - but for now I'm too frustrated with looking for things that, for all I know, may not exist in this version (for example the key to the diary. Someone else has mentioned the camera, etc). A really good effort so far though
. It's because the Cabinet is split in 2 parts, the right part is empty and the keys are in the left part.
