I'll share my thoughts on both the adventure, and what the adventure allowed me to learn about the Starfinder playtest.
Playtest Thoughts
Having a focus on research and information gathering made it incredibly obvious how much Starfinder 2e needs an Arcana skill equivalent for STEM knowledge that *isn’t* an overly niche and mostly useless Lore skill. Lore skills are *mostly* ignored or are offered as an *alternative* specialty to the base skills.
Adventure Thoughts
This adventure had a lot of interesting ideas but required heavy lifting and forethought on my part to make work, and even then, basically required me to give players meta-knowledge and awareness for them to engage with. An overreliance on Survey Points with very little context of their importance or what was at stake caused confusion and indifference to the fiction from my players. Even with moving things around to build more tension throughout, that mostly served to add to the confusion. This is also just a very strange premise and execution for a presumably first adventure for most players, as it’s so highly dependent on the expectation of being good at research and surveillance, or else you’re basically limited to only being useful in its 2 combat encounters.
Overall I really wanted to like this adventure. I'm fine with buying into its premise. It's just a highly specific starting adventure, and it does a very, very poor job of giving you enough actionable systems and information to allow its premise to payoff in play.
