Help me understand and enjoy the game

[Dreamy Monkey]

The game's universe is amazing, the story is intriguing, and it holds great promise, but I just can't seem to enjoy it.
The immersion isn't there for me, and I can't get into it. I feel like, in general, the world doesn't react to my presence or my actions, and that takes away all my engagement and emotional involvement.

I can enter people's homes—I do get a notification that I'm trespassing, but the owners just look at me without saying or doing anything.
I have access to a prison guarded by an army described as tyrannical. I'm warned that I’d better not make any wrong moves since I haven’t earned their trust yet. And yet, I can do whatever I want in this prison—walk into restricted areas, steal things right in front of the guards, and they don’t say a word or even check my identity. I get that I have been granted access, but for an army that’s supposedly ready to punish people for simply speaking out against them, this makes no sense.
I ended up killing a merchant in front of his own customers just to see how the world would react. Well, his customers just calmly walked out of the bar as if nothing had happened.

I’ve also regularly encountered bugs with guards blocking my way. I had to back up to let them pass or wait for them to glitch out of a barrier before I could move forward.
There are also frequent audio bugs where the sound randomly cuts out. I have to go into the settings, switch to another audio source, and then switch back to fix it.

There are other things, like dialogue choices, that don't make sense to me. I tried warning a character that they were being watched, and I was instantly labeled as being on the enemy's side. And this happens with everything I try to do—there's no way to play as a "double agent" and betray later on.

I was really drawn to the promise of freedom in this game. I don't like being held by the hand too much. But here, you quickly end up with about fifteen different leads without any way to gauge their importance in the overall narrative. In fact, it feels more like stumbling upon things by chance rather than engaging in thoughtful exploration with actual puzzle-solving. There are barely any breadcrumb trails to follow.

Because of this, even when I unlock something, I don't feel any sense of accomplishment—I don't feel like I earned it (except for a few simple puzzles I managed to solve).

There are even more points I could bring up, but it would take too long.

I want to love this game—it has so much potential, but I just can't.
I’d like to give it another chance and really immerse myself in it, but I don’t know how.

If anyone has any solutions, insights, or ways to explain certain aspects of the game, I'd love to hear them. The game has potential, and it disappoints me to be missing out on it. Maybe I'll end up completely changing my opinion—I hope I do.

[neojb1989]

I think alot of influencers have overblown this game into something it isn't, and have given people a bad idea of what it is.

The game is actually a really small game made with a small budget, relatively speaking.
Almost all of your points are just from the fact that they just don't have the resources to go big on all of their systems.

If you're trying to enjoy it, I think the best thing to do would be to come back to it with a different perspective. Try to enjoy what it let's you enjoy, and interact with it on it's terms, without comparing it to what it could be.

But fundamentally, this is a small game that does a great job of tricking you into thinking it's larger and more complex than it is. Some people will enjoy that, some will be disappointed. It's very much a guided experience and less true open world freedom.