In short: the game loop is fun. The true suffering is learning the game and its mechanics.
Quasimorph is great, and I enjoyed it to the point where I somehow spent 250+ hours playing it. But there are a few grains of salt.
First of all, my deepest respect to whoever composed the soundtrack. It is genuinely amazing. The music is dynamic and surprisingly diverse, with a separate theme for each planet and several stages that intensify as the mission progresses and everything around you descends into chaos. It gives the game a very strong Doom vibe at times, and it works incredibly well.
The core game loop is interesting, and there are plenty of builds to play with. More importantly, most of them actually work, feel unique, and are worth trying. The amount of content in terms of equipment, weapons, classes, technologies, etc. is honestly insane. In almost every playthrough I ended up with completely different loadouts and playstyles.
At first glance, that sounds like praise for the game's balance. And it is - partially. But the balance is also weird.
Yes, Quasimorph is unforgiving. But not really in the usual roguelike sense. In a roguelike, you die, start again, learn from your mistake, and usually the loop itself doesn't take dozens of hours. Quasimorph, on the other hand, has metaprogression and a narrative campaign. You can make a bad decision in the mid-game, after dozens of hours, and only much later realize that your entire playthrough is basically ♥♥♥♥♥♥.
The main source of this problem is that the game explains almost nothing about its own mechanics.
And I don't mean combat. Combat is at least partially covered by the in-game FAQ, even if there are still plenty of obscure interactions. I mean the metagame itself: faction economy, technological progression, strategic movement around the Sol System, etc
For example, the game doesn't really tell you that travelling long distances early on can be a terrible idea. While you're happily spending weeks flying between planets, faction technology keeps progressing, and when you finally arrive somewhere your enemies may already be running around with much higher-tier equipment than you expected.
This lack of information is probably the most characteristic feature of Quasimorph. The game simply doesn't bother explaining many of its core systems.
The UI unfortunately makes this even worse. It is horrible. Some of it can be improved with mods, but the vanilla interface often actively works against your attempts to understand what is happening.
Don't expect too much from the storytelling either.
The atmosphere and overall vibe are fantastic. Not many people know Daniil Andreev's 'The Rose of the World', which seems to have provided part of the foundation for Quasimorph's lore, and I genuinely appreciate that somebody decided to take such obscure Russian occult cosmology and use it as material for a sci-fi setting.
The developers also stuffed 'intertextual' references into almost every corner of the game, and noticing them makes me autistically chuckle all the time. There is clearly a lot of love and attention to detail behind this world. But there is surprisingly little actual storytelling. The general narrative is quite shallow, and the game barely explains its own lore, which is especially frustrating because the setting is so unusual and has so much potential. You constantly get the feeling that there is something fascinating behind everything you're seeing - factions, demons, corporations, quasi-morphosis, occult cosmology - but the game rarely gives you enough to properly engage with it.
So yes: I absolutely recommend Quasimorph. I have 250+ hours in it for a reason.
Just be prepared for the fact that the hardest enemy in the game is not a quasimorph, a heavily armored mercenary, or some corporate death squad. It's figuring out how the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game works.
