Very rough. I thought this was early access when I bought it, it looks and plays like a bad pre-alpha, but I guess this is just how the game is. After the 3rd time I launched the game trying to continue my save would just kick me back to the menu, and I could not bear to do all the intro again so I refunded the game.
So the first thing I noticed was the loading screens, naturally. There is an image showing what certain keys do, and it is hilariously obvious that it's an image of a keyboard with most of the outline still there from when the dev used the magic wand tool. Not a great first impression, even for early access. Identical artifacting also shows up on the ingame popup telling you the controls.
Next up, for me at least, there was essentially no sound. What I mean by essentially no sound is: No music at all, No ambient sounds (there was a single loop of birdsong but nothing else), Limited attack sounds (The bow makes a slight noise only when you fire it but it's very quiet even with headphones, and why you would be wearing headphones to play a game with no sound I don't know), Little of anything audio-wise to distract from the rest of the game. Certainly not dialogue, since the majority of dialogue takes place as coloured text on a solid black screen, which the game awkwardly cuts to anytime characters talk. The text is clunky but not to the point of being broken English, which is a plus, however there are multiple misspelled words and random words formatted with s/l/ashes in them like so or words that begin with /r/n in front of them, Etc. (presumably actually part of the code which was improperly formatted) And some lines of text, not spoken by spanish characters mind you, were randomly in spanish. The text hangs onscreen for a long time regardless of length, with no way to skip or speed it up, so a single word sentence will sit onscreen for a good 7 seconds or so as you wait for something to happen.
The combat is awkward, with the bow having little feedback or weight to it, especially with the limited audio feedback. The tutorial requires you to shoot 3 stationary coconuts, and this really shows off how often the arrows don't register, with the last coconut in particular having about 6 arrows in it before the game counted it as "hit" When shooting at moving enemies you might as well just close your eyes and fire randomly, I guarantee it will have the same effect.
The graphics and textures are not great, but they are not bad enough to take away from the game if it was good. Since it's not they are basically just the most competent thing. All of the characters I saw share the same two models, one male and one female, so I'm not gonna say this is an asset flip since I haven't checked, but it seems quite likely. The male models all have flat ken doll genitals too, which is especially funny since one, the loincloth they wear covers none of their actual crotch for some reason and two, all the women have exposed breasts so the game is clearly not concerned with modesty. Not that important really, just a little thing I noticed and found funny.
The most annoying thing for me overall was the movement. The default walk is the kind of thing another game would use to tell you that your character is about to die: limping and shuffling along so slowly to the point that you might as well just have run as the default and not even include a walk. You can run, of course, by holding down shift, however this has it's own issue. Probably the only thing I found genuinely entertaining in this game is the running. Since you are holding a bow, it constantly swings in front of your face up and down up and down as you run, to the point that it feels like your character has a wiper-blade on their face. I found it funny but I know if I played the game much longer it would have eventually driven me insane.
The NPC walk/run animations are also pretty terrible, long of random shuffling and twitching. Another element that snakes, Ouroboros-like, back around to compound the ineffective shooting mechanics, as even if the arrow goes in the right direction and the hit registers, the enemy can just nimbly dodge the attack using the acrobatic technique of "having a stroke"
So yeah I like the idea of this game (which is why I bought it obviously) but I just can't with this. I was hoping from the store page that it would be somewhat comparable to Betrayer, which has problems of it's own but still, did the same time period and weaponry presented in a similar way but far more competently. I hope the dev will continue to work on this despite it not being in early access when it really should be, and if they do eventually this *could* be worth playing, but for now it's really not something you should be charged money to experience.
