I have sunk more hours into this game than any other game. Mostly online in Team Deathmatch, but that was nearly a decade ago. The world building is second to none, it feels real and there's nothing better than jumping in and zipping around the map for ten minutes. It's the definition of a sandbox game. The story is pretty much flawless, well acted, animated and paced, with plenty of variety. It's a masterpiece, with endless replayability. My only gripe is load time; that's what stopped me playing; I could spend 30 minutes before I got into a match I actually wanted to play.

Quirky and unique, and when playing locally with others it provides oodles of opportunities for true belly laughs. 95% of achievements, lacking just one which is too time consuming to attempt (Snug: one of the minigame achievements; I recommend trying to achieve it from the beginning because it's not that straightforward to trigger the minigame, so it gets grindy).

I never quite got the knack of the control system - which is basically the game - and I get a little bit of trauma when I see it in my library. But it's a fun game, worth a try.

I ended up rage quitting! Who'd have thought it! Some puzzles are headscratchers, some are random and some are just a grind. Chapter three in particular is horribly grindy. But that's ok, the problem is the controls. This was presumably designed for mouse so the Xbox build is horrible. Precision control is needed and the snapping isn't forgiving enough. Menu navigation is horrible, which is why I quit (I had nearly finished a level, a very grindy level, and went to the menu and accidentally clicked the reset option). It has potential to be a fun little puzzler but was marred by being horrible to control.

As it's early access, I don't think it fair to give it a star rating. My feedback on my short playthrough is that this could be the exact sort of game I'm looking for, except it just doesn't quite get there for me personally.

The one thing that really hits is the exploration and the feeling that you're in the world. The emergent gameplay of creating your own path is delightful. I started somewhere, a river or shore I think, and headed north to the tea house by the tree as recommended by a random. I talked to the manager there who said that I must be heading to a certain place. I didn't take a note of the place, but figured I'd find it and recalled rough directions. It seemed to me like my emergent story was to head to that place; that was my role-playing element; that's what my character would do. I couldn't find the place, alas, and kept hitting roadblocks. I'd spoken to the tea shop manager to try and get him to repeat what he said, but it didn't work.

So I was at a bit of a dead-end as to where my story would take me, at which point I lost the immersion and started to think whether the feel/vibe of the game was enough for me to spend another 20 mins or so walking back to the tea house. I opted not to continue. I wasn't interested in side-quests at this point, I don't like the art style and certainly don't like the character design, the music was not drawing me either, and the landscape felt more magic realism than fantasy (which is fine, just not what I wanted). So I reluctantly called it quits and refunded.

It is interesting, to me at least, that it captured the exploration elements better than something like Skyrim (not to criticise it, but journey moments in Skyrim were more retrospective than active). The fast travel between sections of the map were annoying as were the limitations on where you could go in a particular scene, but the journey was ever-present and palpable.