I feel the mechanical nakedness of this game is both a blessing and a curse. At first I was worried that it would hurt immersion, but the great characters and fantastic ambience & music design dragged me fully in after the first 20 or so minutes. I even found that the nakedness of the system made you really feel what your impact in the world is, and really highlighted the sense of player agency which is plentiful in this game.

But on the flip side, the game being so exposed made me avoid exploring for exploring's sake; it felt like if I was meant to find something, the game would lead me there, and I was worried about accidentally skipping content or wasting my finite time; I acknowledge this may just be a me problem, but it made the mid-game a bit confusing when quests were leading me to 3 or 4 places, none of which I had discovered.

Towards the end, when there was only one or two things left to advance, the gameplay loop becomes very straightforward and actually quite boring, but hopefully the atmosphere and writing will have invested you enough by then so you can push through it. The main standout aspect of the game to me is that writing, with the endings in particular being some of my favourite pieces of writing in all of gaming. I do think the quality of the writing drops off quite dramatically in the free DLC, but I'm not one to mark down a game for free additional content!