Does it get better?

[Mute Negotiator]

I just started and I'm about halfway through the intro section (I hope) and I gotta say, this is the most painful experience I'd ever beared. The trailer and gameplay footage looked good, but what I've played thus far is just agony. The game is difficult, but not in the sense of "too many enemies" or "not enough weapons". It's difficult in understanding what exactly I'm allowed to do, supposed to do, and what the devs had in mind. For instance, they want me to find a place to rest. I'd passed by 3 beds and none of them are usable. Nobody in town mentions anything about a place to stay or a room to rent. It also wants me to sit by the campfire. I don't see any gameplay reason for this mechanic to exist, as it doesn't seem to alter anything.

Does this game get any better than this painful tutorial section or did I just make a bad decision as a consumer?

[Rotorist]

Hello, I'm the developer of this game. First of all I would like to thank you for your support, because my vision for this game is not very "main stream". You probably can see that there is no "GPS" that tells you exactly where to go and what to do. It gives you general instructions and lets you figure out how to accomplish them.

For example, after you spend enough energy, it tells you that you should find a bed to rest. There are two beds in the village that are usable, while the rest are too dirty/gross. If you have visited/looted each of the houses in the village, you'll find them. When you are at the campfire, it tells you how to sit down next to it; if you do that, and wait for a few seconds, you'll see the NPCs next to you start chitchatting. If you have eaten any food, sitting by the campfire gives you a little bonus in the amount of energy it restores. There are many of these little details in the game for you to discover.

The game is all about exploring and discovering, and it definitely doesn't hold your hand. My advice is to give it a little bit of patience and explore the whole map and try everything. But once you figure out how to sleep, restore health, restore energy, repair weapons, and maybe try crafting something, you'll start to get the hang of it.

Thank you for your patience! Also feel free to ask me if there's anything you don't understand.

[*****]

Originally posted by Jzigzags:

I just started and I'm about halfway through the intro section (I hope) and I gotta say, this is the most painful experience I'd ever beared. The trailer and gameplay footage looked good, but what I've played thus far is just agony. The game is difficult, but not in the sense of "too many enemies" or "not enough weapons". It's difficult in understanding what exactly I'm allowed to do, supposed to do, and what the devs had in mind. For instance, they want me to find a place to rest. I'd passed by 3 beds and none of them are usable. Nobody in town mentions anything about a place to stay or a room to rent. It also wants me to sit by the campfire. I don't see any gameplay reason for this mechanic to exist, as it doesn't seem to alter anything.

Does this game get any better than this painful tutorial section or did I just make a bad decision as a consumer?

You touched on a sensitive point here
The game lacks certain advanced features, like tracking the next steps of a quest, but that's because it is purposefully made difficult. The quest/puzzle dimensions are challenging, on top of a long learning curve. Of course, I'm talking about Plus and Nightmare.
I imagine the reason for this is to compensate for the lack of an open world. If you add a step-by-step puzzle-solving mechanism to the linearity of the scenarios, it is no longer a game.
The bad thing is that there's no "easy" mode. For those who are playing the game for the first time and struggle with the next step and don't bother policing for each clue in the dialogue and other innuendos, the game could be very frustrating.

However, I can also sympathise with the developer's perspective, who wanted a game that engages to the point of solving a mystery, a part of the survival process, not simply killing monsters like a tank and progressing to the following map.

Overall, I can assure you that if you like survival games, it will grow on you, and eventually, you'll become better and better. Then, the sad part would be that the maps are static, and you'll replay the same scenarios; only the random drops would differ.

This game lacks a good community tutorial or a walk-through wiki, which could help those stuck because they missed a line but don't want to sacrifice the difficulty for the rest of the game.