Almost finished with the game clocking in about 35 hours of reading everything and doing every quest.
Preliminary conclusion.
The Good
- Interesting main story and also most side quests are interesting. Most NPCs have something to say with thoughtful underlying themes, which get explored in depth. Areas that stand out are The Bloom, Valley of Dead Heroes/Necropolis and the Meres.
- The quality of writing is for the most part very good, but have noticeable lows in some areas and NPCs. This can give the reader an uneven experience in writing quality, sadly.
- Cool and varied amount of cyphers, and decent amount of small oddities that add to the atmosphere (eventhough they don't really do anything to the game world)
- Fairly decent C&C, although it can take a while for them to affect you as a player.
- The effort system is implemented well, but currently unbalanced before a few patches.
- Nice visuals. Fairly interesting art direction. It could be better, but I'm satisfied with the amount of effects used to create a believeable weird world, and the mixture of 2d/3d art.
- Fairly decent soundtrack/OST by Mark Morgan
- The Mere system is well executed, and gives interesting perspectives to changing the past and interacting with the overall story.
- Decent/good technical performance. No crashes, outright bugs or anything else, flat 60 fps with no dips in most areas on gtx 970 i7 4970k
The Bad
- Severe lack of VA throughout the game, and good VA aswell. Major NPC should have voices, as a minimum.
- Unused potential of the Tides system and how it affects the world, NPC's. Also not very transparant to the player, how the tides swing in terms of choices.
- Cut content rears its ugly head in places, where it seems very obvious that a decision was made.
- The game is way too easy, especially as a mindreading Nano. Skillchecks are far too easy, because it's too easy to achieve success with plenty of effort/edge points.
- Lackluster sound design, not much ambience, not alot of variance in sounds and so on when exploring the world.
- Very bad portrait art design. Some are okay, most are embarassingly bad (Erritis)
- Some might find the game uses abit too much exposition in terms of descriptions of NPCs and places (didn't bother me too much, though, I liked it)
- Some might find the UI bad. It has its shortcomings, I kind of agree, but the UI didn't really bother me that much.
7.5/10 - The good outweighs the bad for me, but I understand why many people will focus on the bad parts, and become very frustrated with this, thus giving the game a much lower score/review.
