Smart, tough little FPS.

The stakes of losing your gear—valuable armor, accessories, and enchanted weapons—are big and do a lot to prop up the experience. I feel more on edge in this than I do in Doom or Counter-Strike. Above all the guns are designed by people who have deep affection for FPSes, their nuances some through wonderfully. Love the gun-specific ammo counter UI.

At first the inventory Tetris felt sort of cumbersome (they do need to add a location-swapping function when moving one item for another), but now I think the game is appropriately stingy with ammo and equipment, you end up making genuine this-or-that choices between a grenade and a piece of armor, slices of pizza or some gun oil. I also like that recipes aren't revealed, that you have to experiment and use logic to combine food items.

The only area that lets me down somewhat is the procedural level design. It's functional but not terribly intricate, I think the environments do need to be simple in order to navigate and scan easily, but the repetition and blankness of them started to wear on me 8-10 hours in.

It's just artificial dificulty, random enemy and loot placement with without any thought, little to no strategy or planning, just hoping for the best and losing everything due to some random stray bullet.

I love a hard game, specially because it's nice to improve on your strategy overtime and overcome challenges, but here there's nothing to improve upon, it's a matter if the game will throw 6 fast moving bullet sponges while 4 others keep shooting you in the distance while there's little to no cover.

Would recommend waiting for a few patches before buying this game

The game is genuinely fun and interesting, the artstyle is consistent and everything seems very well put together. However, as of this moment, I'm not entirely certain whether I can fully recommend this game.

As of writing this, I have since completed several levels. As such, the review past this point will contain spoilers, so if you do not wish to see them, please do not read further.

My biggest gripe is once you complete the caves, you unlock the town. The immediate spike of difficulty in the town completely dwarfs any difficulty found in the caves. The less that is said about the sewers, the better, and the hedge maze can either be peaceful or literal hell depending on how many of the immortal creatures you run into.

Additionally, no progress seems to save past the hedge maze. I've been several levels deep past the hedge maze with seemingly no indication when the next unlocked level will happen, if it already has, and how to possibly get there. I get that a lot of the game is based off intuition, but at times a little guidance every now and then wouldn't go amiss.

Either way, any time I need to escape from any level after the hedge maze, I have to weigh out the pros and cons of doing so, the main con being that all progress past that point is seemingly lost if I do so. This definitely sucks, and if a method doesn't already exist, I wish there were a way to make it feel less punishing.

All in all, I don't think this a matter of skill, if you run out of healing items, you die, you lose all your stuff and then you have to start from nothing all over again. It's definitely a fun game, but could definitely do with some revision.