That sounds roughly like my impressions from a short campaign (roughly 6ish sessions). I kept feeling like it was D&D dressed up in an indie costume–even the three classes are thinly-disguised Warrior/Rogue/Mage, three old D&D archetypes.

A problem I had with intrusions was that, well, they’re a bit intrusive. They’re not like PbtA hard moves in that they don’t respond to anything. They can be arbitrarily dropped out of nowhere. (So in that regard, they’re closer to generic Fate compels.)

I also thought the d20-ized GUMSHOE mechanics were…kinda cute, but unnecessarily complicated. Especially when it came down to setting a difficulty, where you have the GM giving you a difficulty number from 1 to 10, then you have to multiply that by 3 to get the REAL difficulty number.

I will add that I absolutely loved the effects of the little magic items Cyphers.