I purchased this game blindly on a sale thinking it looked vaguely interesting and might be worth a few hours of my time. What I found was a beautiful story in a rich setting with meaningful character progression. At the end of the first play-through I felt a deep satisfaction, with no sense of loss or frustration. I wasn't frustrated by the achievements I had missed or the areas I hadn't explored, I just felt content reflecting over the story I'd carved out of the game's world. I've had three playthroughs now and I've loved them all. Couldn't recommend this game enough.
What I hoped for: A gritty sci-fi RPG with meaningful character development, engaging locations, and thoughtful turn-based combat. What I got: After 5 hours playing, I had had enough of my unadventurous crawl through four different dystopian residential / workplace buildings, full of exhausted Marxist sci-fi ('wage-slaves' etc.) and tired game-play. The game may be independent, but the thinking behind it is not: there is not a mechanic or an idea that doesn't feel borrowed from another game, and the result is expectedly uninspiring. The character creation screen was arguably the most exciting part of the game for me. There's a good variety of interesting classes, from Lovecraftian magic builds to engineers who focus on pet control, and a promise of a diverse universe. However, under the sheer bulk of discordant and inaccessible information, character progression petered out into meaninglessness. I'm familiar with RPGs boasting spreadsheets of statistics to sink your teeth into. There's no gravity pulling the numbers together here, just a large spread of functions acting independent of each other. Like stars separated by the vacuum of space, classes feel unconnected. When it comes to damage types, status effects and move sets, the combat is a breadth v depth affair. You'll be fighting lots of the same enemies, who do lots of the same things, over and over. I lost touch with the moves I was choosing - it was all so repetitive and formulaic that I could win pretty much every battle and leave with full health on challenging mode. Nothing forced me to adopt new tactics or rethink a situation. I love Phillip K dick, I love Ursula LeGuin, I love Isaac Asimov, I love sci-fi. The setting here is just uninteresting - loads of greedy corporations (I cared about none of them) plundered by you, the guy who doesn't play by society's rules. And how are you going to do this? By exploring similar looking randomly generated office blocks over and over. Meh.
