This game feels like taking an extended road-trip with your friends, to see the sights, and get into adventures - that's really the best way to describe the atmosphere of the game. Its visual aesthetic reminiscent of Firewatch, melancholic music ala Oxenfree, and quirky flavor-text all reinforce this mood. The mechanics are like Oregon Trail meets XCOM meets FTL, which could be made to fit this fun-feeling theme. However... The game is difficult far beyond anything you'd expect from this relaxed style. It features RNG heavier than many Rogue-likes (following the Berlin interpretation, get off my lawn, you whippersnappers), with far fewer opportunities for actual survival, except perhaps the murderous IVAN, but that game's entire raison d'être (and full name "Iter Vehemens ad Necem") is to stop you from winning. Here in Overland, it feels extremely out of place. The game does not, as far as I can tell, have any Left-4-Dead- or Half-Life-2-style mechanics to smooth out the difficulty of the game. That means that you'll constantly be fighting the downward spiral to death, unless you get pretty lucky early on and also play very well. If you like hard-as-nails games, you'll be well-served here, but if you're new to perma-death games, or don't like playing perfectly in puzzle-like games, you should avoid this game. The developers are fairly receptive to player feedback (although the conversations appear to all be happening on Steam, rather than splitting the base with GOG's forums), so I'm hopeful that the devs will implement some kind of difficulty settings. As-is, the restart-level option is insufficient, in my opinion.
This game has amazing clay visuals which, just like in The Neverhood (TNH), give the world a lot of character and charm. The music is allegedly good, but since I couldn't hear it, the world felt lifeless and cold. I had about 3 seconds of music cut in randomly, maybe four times in the whole game - the rest of the game was in complete musical silence. There's no justifiable reason that a game in 2015 should have its music not play, especially when half of the game experience is in its music. There's other problems that also hurt the game. In TNH, your mouse cursor would helpfully change shape to indicate objects you could click on, or exits to your current room - a feature that's completely lacking in this game, which means you'll be random-clicking, hoping to find what to press. There's also things like, for example, a certain button that seems like it's a game glitch, if you're interacting at the wrong time - your character will just do nothing, and you won't know why you can't click on this button. At the correct time, it will press, and you'll know that something must have happened in the next room. Truly frustrating. There's also one puzzle that is straight from TNH - the cannon. I can understand the devs wanting to call back to fun moments from TNH, and honestly the style, shape, and humor from the new cannon all felt good to me. However, the actual puzzle was identical. It broke the fourth wall, when I was asked to do the same 3-thing 3-thing code puzzle, to overcome this obstacle. All together, this is an unpolished game, and a weak sequel to The Neverhood. I wouldn't recommend buying it until they fix the music at minimum. If they lower the price, or fix some of the other smaller problems, then this game would be worth it. Otherwise, flip a coin. It's not horrible, but it's not amazing either.
You'll spend the entire game wandering around, backtracking, trying to figure out where you still need to go. The map doesn't help in this regard, because it's centred on the player, and zoomed in. Even if you wanted to just wander a maze fighting monsters, the fighting mechanics are shallow. There's a single attack button you'll need to mash throughout the game. Monsters are either trivially easy to deal with (melee), or nearly impossible to kill without dying (ranged).
