I held out hope that this game had some underlying story about purgatory or maybe had themes touching on the endless futility of spending hour after hour doing transparent meaningless quests in a video game. It was so close.

This game has a lot of things to do. For some reason I felt compelled to do them, maybe because my brain is broken from being conditioned to need that next chemical boost of a quest well done. The game is a wild goose chase, everyone needs something from someone else. You will spin up so many systems. Grave keeping, farming, shipping, fishing, harvesting, refining, dungeoning, building, socializing, researching, alchemizing. Each one of them necessary, and every step in one system requires progress in another. You'll bounce around in what is maybe the most complicated path I've seen in games.

...and then it will end. There are about six characters whose piecemeal progress will come to a conclusion, each one's incremental progress leading to the next chapter in another, but then you'll do it. You'll have done the things the game set out for you to do. And then you'll get a black screen with two characters breaking the fourth wall to tell you the game is over. And they'll tell you the things you wanted to see or do in the finale were explicitly outlined as design decisions not to include. And that'll be it.

I played this game like a man possessed. I was the undead zombie, day after day making progress in my systems. Laser focusing my efforts to not waste time or energy. If I wanted to accomplish X then I would have to focus on Y. Without a smile on my face I would set out to accomplish my task. I found little joy in this game, good as it was at keeping my attention, and yet I finished it. What a weird thing for me to do at this point in my life. ... is this gaming?

Is this worth your time? Well... is any game worth your time? No, probably not. Did I have fun along the way? Maybe, not really. Is it addictive in a "just one more" way that broken people like myself crave? Unfortunately yes.