First, let me be absolutely clear; this is a game that I tried to very hard to like. I've been watching its development on youtube since the first few big, popular videos caught my eye. I wanted to explore this seemingly endless expanse of strange, bizzare landscapes, see for myself these angelic monstrosities that roamed the world, unearth the esoteric meanings of its systems and follow what scant threads of lore I could to their doubtlessly interperative and incomplete ends. Instead, what I got was like seeing a mosaic of beautiful colors blended together until all meaning was lost, and all that remained was a loose, greyish brown goop. The environments, despite the randomized tilesets, become familiar and predictable. The layers of the game world, while interesting at first, threaten to strand you in boring, repetitive deserts of nothing, forcing you to either die and return to already familiar territory or commit to excavating into yet more deserts. What was once isles of uniqueness and beauty, will by the very nature of the game's push for exploration, become drab and normalized. Even the crafting, when it isn't being frustratingly cyclical, will seemingly always only produce differently textured packs of the same sea of blocks, with a scant few nuggets of intrigue, that more often than not lead into yet more downward-spiraling crafting cycles, defeating the enjoyment of experimentation.
My point I'm trying to make is that the game, realistically, has only a few hours of life, minimum, before it will begin to run dry of material. It runs into the exact same problems that every other "infinite" game does, eventually you start to see past the surface and into the deeper mechanics, and the illusion of infinity falls away when you see the same molds showing up again, the same hills made of smores instead of couch leather, with the same brick houses of cardboard boxes stuffed with orange plastic blocks instead of green plastic blocks or red plastic blocks, and you realize that outside of the few unique aspects this is all the game has to offer. And what is unique, in my opinion, is not enough to justify wading through one more ocean hoping the meat elephants don't kill me and undo my time spent exploring, waiting for my next chance at making another leaky pendant, because I really don't want to hate wand down into the empty onyx sea again.
Aside from the OST, I'll probably not touch this game again for a while, not until I can forget everything I learned and approach it with the wonder of the unknown I once held for this game, before it all became very much known.
