Very interesting. It seemed to me like a nice take on the Pokemon genre, with more tactical combats, and a theme that leaves room enough for lots of cool and crazy things. Plus, yaks! Yay!
I liked the flow of the demo, I never felt lost, I always knew what to do. The dialogues were a good fit, they felt right in the game and I never skipped them (but I almost never skip dialogues so I don't know if my experience of any use). I can't say I played enough to be sure that all the followers and the enemies were balanced but my general impression was that they were. This turned out to be a little disappointing at first, since my dragon seemed to be not much stronger than a goblin (and being a Tolkien fan that is quite outrageous) but I think it makes sense in a pokemonesque context. The battle at Amber Island seemed certainly more challenging than the previous ones but I had been saving the big guns (I had all my followers in top shape, lots of items and spent all my mana as soon as possible) so the combat itself ended pretty rapidly. Throughout the game I didn't use many deity spells, mostly I saved the mana for the conversion spell and to let my followers cast some spells of their own (which turned out to be quite powerful).
On the negative side, It took me a while to figure out how the dungeon maps worked. I first thought that they were a bit crowded but after a while I realized that each monster in the map represented indeed only one monster, not a squad (I was thinking in something like the old Final Fantasy, Lufia, Chrono Trigger, etc). But as soon as I got followers of my own I understood it better so I can't say that was much of a problem. Another thing that stroke as a little odd (perhaps again because I had some other RPGs in mind) was the fact that the enemies did not move. This made me explore the dungeons a bit recklessly since I knew I was safe unless I touched the enemies. This also allowed me to pretty much pickup all the items in the dungeon and get to all the chests without facing any enemies. I figure that this maybe due to the fact that the levels are procedurally generated but I would have happily sacrificed the procedural generation in order to have more finely crafted levels.
So that were my impressions on playing the demo. I hope it helps and best of luck in the IGF! Cheers and
yaks!