The review that is negative about the lack of inventory or a hotbar system (tab and a mouse move - super fast) obviously didn't spend anytime looking for because I found it in my first 5min of gameplay. Will update further, but I felt like I needed to counter their negative review, because they simply don't know what they are talking about

Okay, I really like this game.... but lets just start with what it's not.

It's not a finished game (So expect typical early access stuff like unoptimized performance, save wipes, crashes, bugs, missing content, missing features, etc)
It's not a typical survival base builder.... you get a base, it's pretty much done and you just upgrade your benches and other parts of your base.

So with those out of the way I can tell you that it's more akin to a more old school survival game except instead of food and water you'll be just absolutely wrecking yourself with poisonous glowing goop. Luckily the timer stops in your base, and the penalty for death is really not too bad (drop your materials, trek back to your corpse... most enemies stay dead). The effects you get from the different serums also add a sort of metroidvania approach to some of the game play along with cool abilities, protections, and increased times between dosages .

The combat is pretty good, you get a dodge, power attack, block... you know the basic stuff. The enemies are hard (at least to me... but take all this with a grain of salt as I'm not really the best judge of what some people consider "good" combat) and in my short time I've ran into 5 different enemy types (I've only just left the tutorial area and hit the first building).

So yeah, I like it, it's a super cool concept with all of the ways you can just (and I'm not kidding) just destroy yourself with all these crazy goops you can make, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of this ones progress.

Edit: I see some people are like "RRRRRREEEEEEEE A timer! Timers are bad!!".... Guys, all survival games have timers, it's food and water... this one just has a countdown on it.

This game has an interesting concept that I like, but I honestly can't recommend it at this time. I do understand that its early access so I'm gonna talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly that this game has.

TLDR: Game has a cool setting, gameplay mechanics are frustrating, game is buggy, and QoL is extremely lacking in this game. Wait until its more developed and check reviews before purchase.

The bad (Why you shouldn't buy this game): I encountered a game crippling bug about 3 hours into the game playing casually. This was encountered while doing the stepping into darkness quest when I died to a dullard sneaking up behind me. I was halfway through the quest when I was no longer able to turn on the electrical boxes needed to unlock the door holding the blueprint. I tried restarting the game and that didn't work so I decided to just return to base and ready up for the next quest. Turns out I was unable to even do that as I was no longer able to interact with any of the crafting benches and was effectively soft locked due to a relatively minor mistake of allowing an enemy smack me from behind. In addition to this bug, there are bugs where reloading a checkpoint allows for ranged enemies to hit you through the walls before they are able to load in, and there is at least one wall in the shipping container town you can just walk through.

The Ugly: The story has an interesting premise, the execution of it seems a bit janky though, immediately calling an unknown character over the radio by name is a little jarring after a slightly odd animation of inspecting your hands for some reason when you pick up the radio. The player character does in fact have a reason to know the name of the radio contact and its frequency, but this is tucked away in the journal that I would have never encountered if I hadn't been looking around in the journal fragments for hints on how to get to the floral research facility. Only other oddity that sticks out to me is that Natasha (I think that's the name of the creature you encounter in the floral research facility) is mentioned to potentially have boobs for some reason? Maybe I missed similar quips in other enemy entries but this almost felt out of pocket with a lack of establishing the character as someone to make such quips. Either you should establish that they make these comments regularly about the things that try to kill them, or just remove the comment that basically destroys what I'd imagine is supposed to be a tense moment of you hiding from a mutant you are clearly not ready to fight when you look back at it.
Since it'd be easier to just list the QoL issues I had, here's a list
-Inventory management sucks, moving things from your inventory to storage is tedious as you have to re-select an item once the previous stack has been moved over one item at a time. Collecting plants from the hydroponics tables is annoying as you need to select the individual plant and harvest individually to the point I just stopped bothering during my short play through.
-Ladders are extremely annoying, seriously, having to put an input E to interact to get on makes sense, but having to climb up slowly with the sprint making it only barely faster, only to hit the top and stop to have to hit E again to start a slow animation to get off the ladder is frustrating and basically resulted in me finding any other way to get up or down from things if I could to save time. Thankfully ladders are generally avoidable, or rarely required.
-Combat, basically I did my best to run by everything I reasonably could, or if I needed to fight, did so boringly cheaply or by trapping enemies on geometry or in one case, the ground itself. The player fights slowly, enemies are kinda stupid, dodging isn't taught to the player and was discovered by accident. Dullards are way too tanky and hit way to hard. This is likely to encourage players to use Serums that give blunt resistance, but its honestly easier to just run in circles around them to lock them into a spinning around attack thats easy to avoid (while other attacks seemingly home in on the player) and just click until bad guy horizontal. Actual placement of the enemies is alright up until you reach the container town's greenhouse, where you get spammed with ranged enemies to just run past or do what I did, and kill them individually in the dark. The floral research facility however is a much different story, locking doors behind generators that activate the plant enemies. This is a great way to force the player into combat, except the execution is god awful as they also have Dullards which require your attention to safely fight while you get peppered from several angles by plant enemies waiting for you to turn on generators. Once you suffer your way through that you get more generators with more dullards, plants, and now tentarats for even more ranged damage. Get too far away from a Dullard while you're dealing with this and they will run back to their spawn point and instantly full heal once they reach it, prompting you to continue to retreat for net zero progress, or risk further damage chasing them down if theyre low enough to kill. This full heal happens regardless of how close the player is or how much health they have, once you proc their return to spawnpoint behavior they are going to blindly run back to heal. If youre lucky youll get them stuck on something they can't reach you behind and just kill them for free. Enemies do respawn but very slowly thankfully.
-Healing items such as bandages and painkillers should tell you that they are usable, not just 'don't use them' resulting in me scrapping a lot of supplies that would have made my life easier.
-Respawning is basically worthless in most situations. You can just quit to menu for free and then reload the last checkpoint which the game gives you plenty of. Its better than death being overly punishing, but losing your items because you died is easily bypassed by just jumping back in time and not having to deal with making serums to get your old stuff and continue on. I do appreciate though that respawning lets you keep weapons and serums though, this makes death a bad thing without being punishing with how bad combat is. I discovered this by accident when I overshot with my mouse and returned to menu when attempting to respawn, and then kept doing that afterwards.
-As mentioned by other reviewers, the games optimization needs some work. The gates work as good loading zones and hide this loading decently well, the biggest thing is just performance while actually playing. For clarity this game was being run on a hard drive and not an SSD.
-Pausing the game does not pause the timer. In game menus make sense, but if I'm hitting escape I've grown accustomed to being able to get up and take care of something.

The Good: I don't want to leave the review off with nothing but frustration and talking about the games failings. Its an early access title that appears to be shooting for triple A status/quality and is priced accordingly. I thought briefly about refunding but was getting enough fun out of it to keep playing up until my softlock encounter. The story premise is really strong, the enemy designs are interesting and fitting for the mutation theming, learning how to craft items by scrapping them is a great fallback incase you scrap an item you need later or cant find it. Resources respawn at I feel appropriate timings and the hydroponics farm has the potential to be massively useful if it weren't for how time consuming it was. The timer mechanic feels well done, giving players an incentive to return home eventually as well as making time a manageable resource. Pausing the timer at the home base as well is a massively good move. The visible changes to the players hands and arms as you distort more with each serum use is a good touch. I hope to see this game do well in the future.