I beat it a couple days ago. Had a grand time.
I loved the exploration aspect, it was clearly the focus. Wandering around, finding locations/items/NPCs who I had absolutely no clue what they were for when I found them... all of that felt really good. The highlight for me was finding Thalasea while wandering around trying to find entrances to the Deep to explore. At this point my party was like level 4 with some iron chain mail and swords for equipment. I had this vague thought that I'd heard someone mention her in connection to ice so I typed it in, and voila! ICE IX! Went straight to Stormpeak just to screw around and figure out the layout for later once I had the Lantern. Guess what kind of treasure Stormpeak has
Combat was serviceable. I would have liked making bow users a little more powerful throughout the game, and maybe clearer indication of what causes a Backstab (from what I could tell, Backstabs are just this game's version of crits?). Hit rate, especially in melee, seemed a little on the low side. At 10 Combat skill, I seemed to be hitting about 50% of the time. Ouch. Ranged, for whatever reason, actually seemed to hit much more consistently. I really appreciated that shots could pass through allies. Oh, and I never figured out what the point of hiding was. It didn't seem to make me untargetable, and attacking instantly dropped the Hide for what appeared no benefit. What gives?
Character progression felt really good, but it had issues. I liked the 2-tiered progression of raising skills whenever you feel like it, but stats only at their respective pool. I also liked only getting 2 points per level, and the feasible level cap being around 8 (9 is doable if one or two chars get all the xp from killing Wights). I really considered how and when to distribute my points, especially for the first 4 levels or so. But I would have appreciated a little more clarity, either documentation through readme/manual or ingame, on what each of the stats did. I didn't realize, until digging around on the Discord, that Wisdom is something akin to this game's Luck stat, for instance (affects just about every action but in a smaller way then other stats). And once I did understand it, finding the Pool of Wisdom was a big moment for me. Possible missed opportunity for a high moment if I hadn't known. I also didn't realize that Agility was mono-focused on raising evasion- I raised it on both my melee fighters hoping it would improve their abysmal to-hit chance. Things like that were frustrating.
Overall I had a fantastic time with the game. Planning to start up Lurking II later this week.