We're seeking knowledge and enlightenment; we're starting off in Rome, the "eternal city", and our journey will take us all across Europe and Asia and the Middle East. It's the middle ages, too, and one of the first things we see is a plague doctor carting away the dead.
The grandeur of this epic is somewhat compromised by the reduction of each region to a single, lightly implemented room. At one point, we're allowed to travel back and forth between Cathay and Muscovy with neither effort nor comment; and later on between India and Jerusalem. This stretches the bounds of belief. I can see how the back-and-forth might be necessary, if a player hasn't picked up everything they need from one location before moving on the next, but surely there must be another way of dealing with this.
There are a lot of little, little mistakes. Small things, like leaving the way to the final "winning" location open from the start location, or incorporating narration into location descriptions. The writing manages to convey the protagonist's feelings on the journey most of the time, but then there are parts where it seems oddly detached. The death of the knight, for example, seems to have about as much emotional impact as lunch on Tuesday
I do get the sense that the author has drawn from an impressively wide field of knowledge, and there appears to be a sort of philosophical or moralistic backbone to the story plan, but I don't think the implementation really captures even a fraction of the story's potential. This really feels a lot more like a very rough sketch of a much, much bigger story, one with a lot of good things going for it, all of which are right now only mentioned in point form.
I suspect that a lot of this can be overcome simply by filling up each room with as much period detail as humanly possible: things to examine and touch and play around with. We have the length of the journey established; what we need now is breadth.
It's all the ingredients for a full English breakfast: bread for toast, eggs, ham, bacon, sausages, beans, mushrooms, potatoes, tomatoes, cheese, etc. etc., but none of it actually cooked. You could probably scarf down a couple of these ingredients without preparation, but that's just not the same thing at all.