Recent reviews by 人間失格

Quick TLDR;
Did I have fun with my time in the game? Yes.
Has this game made me swear off Bethesda as a company for the foreseeable future? Unfortunately, yes.
Did this game do something new/interesting in any way? Debatable, but mostly no in my opinion.
Do I think the developers of this game wanted to make a good game? Absolutely.
Would I pay 70$ for this game? No. $10-20 feels like a good value.

I enjoyed it but it's a loading screen simulator. When in other games I can Travel from one corner of the map to the next, meet dozens of NPCs, complete a handful of quests, and never once hit a loading screen without choosing to (Skyrim). Meanwhile I leave the Constellation base (1 load screen), Fast travel via the menu to the space station I was told to go to (2), dock with the station and enter the station (3), load into an appox 5x10 room with randomized loot and go to the next door to enter the station proper (4), and you're finally at the quest location. Did you catch that last part? There's a 5x10 room at the front of one of the first quest locations that has loading screen to get in and out, as far as I can tell there's no reason for this. The station is pretty big, and later areas in the game dwarf it. When I first encountered this I thought I got turned around when I was looting the room and turned around only to reboard my own ship. It's just lazy design.

I think that sums up the game, lazy design or rather stifled design. You can tell people who had excellent ideas worked on this game. Chunks are fun, I was blown away by parts of the story, the weapon designs are interesting, and many of the characters are compelling. I remember when I came across a ship called The Valentine, it was manned by a lovely man who was singing a sea shanty over the comms. I sat and listened for a bit and afterwards I hailed him and learned that his father and his father before him were pilots and his entire linage could be traced back to the ships of the golden age of sail. Soon after he jumped out of the system and I was left both pleasantly surprised and sad the moment had passed. It was one of those magical moments that can only be found in games media. But all this genuine love that was poured into this game was murdered by what can only be described as corporate greed. The NPCs are stiff, the creatures are the same, you can't go through a town with spending 3-5 minutes in loading screens (32g ram, 3080, Ryzen 9 5900X) if you want to go into more that one building, god forbid do multiple quest lines within a city (I love Neon but there's no reason inner and outer Neon needed to be separate). The Creation engine single handedly ruined this game. It's might technically be Creation 2.0 but it's just polished garbage.

For me, Bethesda is dead.

They're good at advertising, I'll give them that. But otherwise, this game is a series of the same player dungeons (Variation is apparently too easy) and the same loot (Unless a recolor counts as epic). The only times a piece of armor is anything but a recolor is when it is acquired from a blacksmith, and the gap between stats of blacksmith Items vs drops is so large that the blacksmith shouldn't even be apart of the game.

A good time, tickles both the puzzle solving and deeplore itch.