After playing for about 2hrs, here are my thoughts.
First, the positives.
The atmosphere is interesting, and the 2.5D graphics is pleasurable. The designs are captivating and really set the plague horror vibes, and there are elements in the dialogues that make you wonder what the hell is going on. It had a nice intuition in the progress system, although it wasn't my vibes (will be explained next).
Now, the sour taste.
It crashed as soon as I tried to turn off v-sync, and any time I alt-tabbed away it never allowed me to get back to it, glitching the screen instead. But I let it slide, since it is patchable and may have been my PC's issue.
The game feels overall unpolished and not really inspired on the gameplay side. The commands at first are not intuitive if played with mouse and keyboard, no explanation is ever given on gameplay mechanics and there are many aspects that feel a first draft rather than a complete game. A special mention goes to the minimap, which I found very messy, but worse of all after exiting the area it removed first the NPC markers, then itself.
The gameplay loop didn't hook me in, it felt like doing chores instead of playing a strategy game. I thought I would've had to precisely manage my resources, but I never found myself in need of actually managing my stamina both due to an extremely high amount of consumable drops (that do not need to be used exclusively in combat) and having it restored by the campsite, which I assume is a bug or bugged since you can rest in it infinitely.
The game is really unbalanced in the player's favour, since you have an army at your disposal of character that are more powerful than the foes at base values, and it becomes especially easy if you overlevel even a single character, a thing that WILL eventually happen since you cannot change the base doctor (at least in the first hour or so, but I assume it will be for the whole game since it didn't let me change it with other doctors).
Using the survivors as a resource to build a better base is an interesting gimmick, but it was NEVER explained to me that retiring a survivor at a specific structure would've increased its level. Also, it makes everything a lot grindy, since the amount of survivors needed to level up buildings seem a lot (maybe their quality influences the advancement, but I didn't test it).
Overall, the game has potential, but I didn't appreciate it to the fullest. If it was more polished, maybe I would've given it 10 hours or so before reviewing it.
