I spent the refund period configuring a cat in a tiny costume, so I might as well write an early game review now. I will possibly expand on it later.

I started out by installing the game. That was exciting. The game then lets me read the GDPR disclaimer, which already sets the stage for some great story telling.

Once past the main menu, I got to build a character and also a cat. The character-slash-cat-builder is very nice but 75% of the cat tails on offer were really weird.

Then I found myself on a boat, not in a prison. This is nothing like Skyrim. The dinner hall of the cruise ship is crewed by cats. I'm now angry with my cat for never serving me dinner. There was also an anoying woman on the boat and a dude with a really infuriating grin who looks like a colleague I know from work. The boat capsized. I hope the guy with the constant grin drowned.

After some weird Disney World **** I am now in the jungle with the annoying woman. She just told me that I must hide because I don't have a weapon. This is odd, since I have been repeatedly slashing off plant parts with my arm-blade by this point. Maybe that's exclusively for chopping fantasy onions, but actually, I also have an additional blade strapped to my lower back. This game probably lacks internal consistency.

I can also tell they spent too little time on the support cast, because while I was allowed to select from twenty different sets of moans and groans for the underwear model I configured, the anoying woman keeps repeating the exact same recording every six seconds now, as I am alt-tabbed out to write this. Also, she says to find her I am to follow the trail of flies. I made a note to check if I can craft her some deodorant from the glands of a deceased Whaloraptor or something later on.

A minute further into the game, our half of the Spice Girls cast had to be rescued from an overgrown pet lizard by a knight with a sword so big, I am actually astonished I have sufficient RAM in my PC to render it. He must be compensating for something - he probably isn't an A-list hunter like the girl power posse that came off of that boat. Actually, I could have easily stayed away from the pet beast myself, but the game forced me to run straight toward it, so I could make a split second escape with a jump away from the explosion. I mean raptor. (Could have used an explosion there honestly ...).

Then we arrived at the main town of the "New World". The people here are very nice, at least they don't treat me like an illegal immigrant. Some of them are only half voiced though. I learned from a furry nerd creature that the Elder Dragons return to this world every few centuries or something. They don't know why, but apparently that's a problem. Finding out why they return periodically appears to be the main quest. My money is on a symbiosis with the Reapers. That, or not missing out on the anual return of the McRib.

Ultimately, I can feel the developer really, really wants me to play the game: The cut scenes are entirely unskippable, the menu key is disabled during the tutorial, and you are only ever allowed to quit the game at certain points in the storyline, which, for a PC game, is really quite a cheap move!

This is also clearly a game of Japanese origin, where the button assignments are chosen by tossing Scrabble(tm) tiles. The game insisted on using mouse button four and five, which is a first for me, and also didn't work right. Luckily, one can remap those keys. Unluckily, that happens in the "keyboard" menu, and thus, figuring this out should give 1000 XP on it's own.

Another negative, frankly, is that the game tries to shove a god-level armor in my face because the expansion has been released, and it wants me to speed run the base game and buy that instead. I refused the armor at character creation, and now the designers have placed it in my cat-adjacent stash. I can't even sell or dismantle it!

But overall, the game looks quite nice, I got it on sale, and due to a fault in my genetic structure (mine, not the game's protagonist, she's absolutely perfect), I'm a sucker for a grindy game, so it'll probably be alright.