It's alright, I had a hard time getting into it. Visually, the world is pleasant. Your character model, not so much. Character is rough all around and not customisable.

Controller support isn't really there. Moving around the GUI wasn't intuitive and I found myself getting frustrated trying to pull things out of stockpiles. I needed 10 sticks. Stockpile had 41 sticks. So I tried to use Split Item. Selected 10 and confirmed. It did nothing. Didn't put it on my cursor, didn't move it. Just did nothing. Tried again, nothing. So I grabbed half the stack expecting it to stick half of the stack on my cursor and use that to quickly create stacks of 4 in my inventory. Well it moved 4 and cancelled the move. So I had to do it again. And again. Then I accidentally clicked the right joystick and moved then entire stockpile into my inventory and which also removed my stockpile from the world. My inventory was now full, so I had to create a new stockpile which automatically moved all 41 sticks back out of my inventory. This is about when I gave up and decided I wasn't willing to continue fighting the GUI.

If this is just the beginning for this game title, then we're in for a treat. I've only played a couple hours in the game so far, and it's definitely up my alley for ticking off grind focused boxes in a game. If you like things easy, this probably isn't for you. If you like time sinks with the sense of accomplishments, this is for you.

'ts pretty good.

Good:
- Looks pretty nice.
- Isn't about zombies or crash landing on an archipelago. Big plus.
- Runs and controls well. Other than your character climbing sticks to pick up a rock off the ground.
- UI is okay, altho it takes some time to get a grasp on how certain things work.
- Bars deplete at a very reasonable rate; if you fill hunger and thirst bars at the beginning of a day, it'll last you until the next day.
- It strikes a nice middleground between casual and "realistic" survival games. While it's quite resource demanding, it doesn't force you to watch an animation to open your backpack or meticulously build a camp fire. Plus, you can just speed up the game with one click during most crafting anims.
- There's a basic (at least for now) prey-predator relations system, where predators will chase and eat prey. Predators will also eat prey from your traps and chests, if they're not secured. A system like this may not be rocket science, but it's nice to see a coyote choosing to chase a rabbit instead of trying to 1v1 a human.
- There's an optional third person camera mode that works surprisingly well, with the only major-ish issue that the camera gets really close if you walk under the roof and it looks like you've gone first person.

Debatable:
- Base building is egregiously resource intensive. Making even a simple hut will take some time.
- Wild animals (mostly the dangerous ones) will casually path into your position or your base for no reason, even if you don't have any meat stashed in chests/laying on the ground. Fire is supposed to keep them away, but it doesn't seem to work.
- After >30hrs of combined demo+paid version playtime, I still don't know if you have to pick stuff up to learn what you can do with it.
- Continuing from the previous point, the Catalogue menu isn't as detailed as I'd like it to be. Vintage Story's 'in-game wiki' remains unchallenged.
- UI, while it's clean and nice looking, can be hit or miss; eg. the grid-based inventory is (visually) very small and it's sometimes hard to tell item icons apart. Additionally, you can't manually rotate the items to place them around the grid as you please. You have to rely on vertical or horizontal sorting. Sometimes you can't pick up items because you don't have space in the inventory, but you actually do, you just have to sort it.
- The titular Blight expands daily, making animals/plants more toxic to eat, so you have to chug potions over and over again. Initially, it's not a problem, but the longer you play, the more toxic the food gets. There's a way to deal with that, but it's a yet another loop or gathering resources and waiting for stuff to craft and there's already plenty of things to craft and wait for.
- Boiling liquids, like water, evaporates approx. 30% of its volume. Which is just silly. I mean sure, boiling does that, it absolutely makes sense, but 30% is too much. Eg. if you want to make a blight potion, you take a 200ml bowl of river water, boil it, lose 60ml, add ingredients, boil it AGAIN and end up with 86ml of the end product. Bro.
- Other minor nitpicks like how it's a bit of a pain to make potions/brews because you have to get the ingredient amounts just right and you can't simply click to fill the crafting grid despite knowing the recipe. Or how burning clay items will harden them individually with their own timers, but turning 5 ores of iron into steel takes as long as if you're smelting one, really big item, instead of 5 small ones.

The blight mechanic dictates the pacing of the game to a certain degree. There's always this feeling you should be doing something "more important" than what you're doing, because the game gets harder over time. Which can be a bit of a problem, since the questline is completely optional and you might not even know that you can make a potion that removes the blight or cures food.

All that said, it's a fun experience if you like this type of survival games. Tasks just naturally flow from one to the other and it's one of those games you feel like you've played for an hour and a half, but it's actually 2AM.

You can clearly see this game is the dev's passion project. They've put years of their life into it and I think it shows, in a good way. I hope it'll continue to improve, because despite everything, it is quite a unique take on the very saturated genre.