Keyboard options are Qwerty, Qwertz or Azerty. If you're on anything else, the game is going to use scancodes and prompt you to press keys based on what they'd be labelled on a keyboard that it knows about. The tutorial decides to teach lots of the keys in a single session, and moves on to the next topic as soon as you perform current topic once. Sometimes the tutorial disables the move that the previous topic was teaching - so perform it once, and then it gets disabled immediately, without the opportunity to practise it before the next topic gives a new key to learn. Counter-attacks are done by blocking and then attacking at the right time. I got stuck for a long time trying to block at the right time but rarely seeing the icon saying that a counter-attack was possible, only to find that there's no limit on the time spent blocking - if you're just stood waiting in the block pose then the enemy will attack in a way that makes them vulnerable. It did come together - when the tutorial was telling me to press C to open the character screen and assign talent points, pressing C actually opened the inventory, showing me that I had a mutagen item. After entering the correct screen, I assigned the talent point and returned to the tutorial, which was still telling me to press C and assign talent points (no mention of mutagens in the German text). So I pressed C again, and noticed that I still had a mutagen, and then poked everything in the character screen until I found a way to use that mutagen. There's a review below from someone who got stuck there, by this broken message. As the game has a lot of high-ratings, I might try it again with a controller instead of mouse+keyboard. However, based just on the tutorial and then re-reading other reviews with the hindsight of that, there's much better games to play instead of learning the controls and UI design of this one.
As the review below says, there are a lot of places where a puzzle requires a repetitive task after you've already worked out the solution to the puzzle. Something that happens very often is that a machine will have 4 dials on which you have to enter a number, and it takes a separate mouse-click or even mouse-drag for each single increment of each dial. Add an extra star if you'll be playing on a Qwerty keyboard and won't want to remap WASD.
Starts well, but the game mechanics end up detracting from each other. Finding the puzzle that you're meant to solve is part of the puzzle, and in the later parts of the game it's often a large part of the puzzle. The rooms are decorated with objects that look like you could pick them up, most of them are just scenery, and the way to find out is to mouse-over them and see if the cursor changes. In the later parts of the game, I found myself walking around large areas full of scenery objects, mousing over everything while looking for the puzzle; it lost the pace and fun of the game.
The current version has a game-breaking bug: after a couple of hours lots of skiers get stuck circling in a small area, causing slow-down and meaning that the happiness in the ski resort stops improving. Starting a new game works for a while, but a couple of hours later the same bug will occur again; the game is effectively a time-limited demo that ends when this bug breaks it. The next thing on the developer's roadmap is "slope edition*", and IIUC that's going to replace the pathfinding code, so I can understand why they haven't published a quick-fix to the current bug. However, on both Steam and Discord there are questions asking for info about when the next update can be expected, and these haven't been answered by the developer. It's a nice relaxing construction game, once this bug is fixed I'll happily change my review to 4 stars, but in its current state I can't recommend buying it.
It's easy to play until dawn yet only feel the rewards that you would get from playing a better implemented game for an hour. Your brain is on auto-pilot for the rest of the time working around quirks and poor integration between the UI and the engine. This isn't part of the challenge in the way that input timing is part of the challenge in almost any other game; this is a game where you would have to pause it even if it were better implemented, the quirks just mean more mouse-clicks while it's paused. Areas where colonists can go are selected by highlighting the allowed parts of the map, which feels like a simple painting application, however it's limited to painting rectangles of at most 51x51 cells per click-and-drag. Suppose I want to my colonists to avoid the top 80 rows of the map - the UI knows what I'm telling it to do and shows that I've dragged over a 250x80 area as well as showing the limited 51x51 area which will be affected, but it requires 10 or more separate click-and-drags before the game engine knows that. This process has to be repeated for each zone (colonists, herbivores, carnivores, animals that haul stuff into the food areas, etc), so it ends up being around 50 click-and-drag operations. Colonists only repair items in the home zone. When you right-click on the item outside the home zone, the UI knows what you want to do but can't tell the engine to do it. Instead the UI tells that you need to expand the home zone, so you have to switch to the painting application and paint that bit. You'll then wait for the repair to finish and manually reset the home zone afterwards, as otherwise colonists will spend time cleaning that area, or run out to repair it again while enemies are shooting at it. Choosing what should be stored in each stockpile feels like a database UI wizard written by someone who is so familiar with the database that they no longer notice the extra effort to work around its quirks.
For me the puzzle sections are good and I like the story, but working out how to do damage to some of the bosses has made me have to watch other people's videos for strategy guides. The typical boss has armour, which means that you first hit it doing almost no damage; enough hits break the armour and you then quickly knock a complete phase of hitpoints off. Sometimes you need to guess the strategy that the developers intended, as other methods mean a lot of hitting it without breaking the armour. Some bosses have a weak-point during the armoured subphase where only hitting that point removes armour. Some of the bosses need to be hit during the armoured subphase in a particular way. That doesn't feel good, especially when late phases of a boss have critical hit attacks which mean starting again from the beginning of the fight and redoing the early phases. That combines badly with some of the early phases having a should-have-done-this strategy and also a works-but-slow strategy, where missing the trick means it takes a long time to get back to the late phase. I feel there's a part of the difficulty curve that the developers have missed, which is a shame as there's a place in-game that's designed for it - in the starting mission hub / info centre there's a dojo with a tutor who initially says that he'll only train you once you've mastered both fire and cold; however once you have those the training doesn't use fire or cold at all - it is only target practise and not the boss-killing techniques.
