I've played 73 hours of this game and won my first game on the 72nd hour, out of a gamble on stupid luck.

I love this game.

Pros: the aesthetic that the game has is astoundingly strong, carried well by the artistic choices & the musical score. the writing is disgustingly good, to the point where i can tell you that i explicitly will get some of it tattooed on me, just because it's so powerful. "This will make someone cry. This may make everyone cry." being an example of an astoundingly good piece of writing from a transitional screen of all things! this shows up for a split second while you're doing something, but it's just, so good? the restraint and the choices of when to extrapolate on the writing is truly the soul of this game.

You will feel like the smartest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ when you start to figure things out in this game, to the point where it's hard to not get sucked into hours of shuffling cards around, feeling like you're uncovering untold things about the very fabric of reality.

Downsides: It always takes a /while/ to get rolling. Even the strongest start (surgeon, imho, if only because detective is /very/ different mechanically) is going to involve a lot of building up to the point where you're actually uncovering the mysteries of the universe. this is compounded by the fact that a big part of this game is random chance and fighting with cards that progressively get more and more numerous. Also, stacks act very weird, cards with timers don't stack, at all, and if a card's original position is distrupted at all, it gets reset. I'm also still not really a big fan of the way that expeditions work right now if only because there's still a lot of random chance tied into getting the ones that are most useful, especially end game.

I haven't had a change to touch New Game Plus Yet, I will Probably (maybe (probably not)) update this when I do.

TL;DR - buy this game, it's a lot of fun and the writing is beyond excellent.