Graphics, story and most of the core game mechanics are all super on point here, but as of right now the game is too buggy to recommend in it's current state. Once it's out of early access assuming they do a proper round of QA and tweaks, definitely buy this.

Bugs I encountered included having to fight bugs with literal game-breaking bugs (Some sort of graphics related memory leak), drinking any alcohol has you never actually sober up enough to keep stumbling and hitting things massively crippling your hit points even if your focus is high enough that you shouldn't, the constellation playthrough map doesn't persist across playthroughs despite having a counter for different endings achieved making it near impossible to try and get all the markers and endings organically.

The menus seem to run on the same instruction set as everything else so it's super easy to hit a memory leak and be forced to force quit and stop the game before you can go back and reload from your last autosave. Expect to do this like at least 30-40 times over two playthroughs as of now. There were also a number of dialog tree bugs such as getting the wrong conversation options when radioing back from your shuttle in different areas.

There were also issues where a questgiver would not permit access to containers (The junk bin / boxes for example) where I was meant to pick up or deposit quest items, rendering the quest impossible unless you could knock out the quest giver.

Most of the core mechanics are good, although having levels randomly assign you a skill point, a perk/determent, both or neither seemed far too chaotic of a progression mode. I'd prefer they fix the progression milestones in place, and be more clear if the perks and detriments offered were randomly assigned or assigned through prerequisites. The dice rolls can be frustrating enough but having something that so hugely effect the core gameplay laboriously save-scummable doesn't feel like a fun feature once you work out that it's built like that, especially since a skill point with no detriment attached is no contest as a value proposition vs hitting the perk/anti-perk progression. While there's some unique abilities on offer for some, many perks offer a single skill point provided certain conditions are met, and require a detriment as a cost. This means that for the most part a skill point by itself is much better value pure and simple. While the dice rolls can be frustrating, I can understand that level of RNG, but wildly varying the power of character progression by pure random chance is taking the RNG too far.

Quality of life features that would be nice would include an option to store a save at each constellation point so you could rewind and try a different path, showing what type of ammo, AP cost and damage a weapon does from the inventory, showing the effects of armor and medicine (At least, medicine you've taken before) from the inventory UI; and having more transperency on the purpose of tools with a function, even if this was walled behind an attribute minimum. Given the relative scarcity of hairclips, it'd also be nice for doors to give a better idea of their relative difficulty before trying to crack them. I know there's a perception check that gives you a description and I assume now that that feature probably has some correlation to the difficulty level, but perhaps that check could just happen automatically with a more clear indicator on success. As of now it just seems very non-streamlined. I don't want to have to manually analyse every door to try and work out if I have a chance on getting into it just to save a single bobby pin.

I understand that some of the opacity is trying to keep the game spiritually true to the classic generation CRPGs it's harkening back to, but the game simply isn't long or well documented enough to make much of the equipment opacity as charming as it's intended to be. There's a lot to absorb in a relatively short plotline. This ain't Underrail; and as such the game could definitely benefit from being a bit looser with basic information as to what's broadly useful and how and what's not rather than expecting the player to test and remember everything. It'd definitely help with making the game more accessible until guides and wiki documentation is completed for all the random junk in the game.

It'd also be nice if esc opened the menu and if alt+f4 actually killed the game as a general request.

Anyway, great story. Needs a bunch of QA and some quality of life updates. I'm sure the release version is gonna be a CRPG classic with good replayability and tonnes of speedrun potential. As of now, they at least need to fix the game-breaking locusts. Having to force quit the game 10-20 times as I try and take out one locust at a time, saving inbetween each just to stop the game from having a stroke really didn't do it any favors.

If the devs can address the most critical game-breaking items I've mentioned, I'll change this review to a thumbs up on request.