I didn't even realize we got a dedicated thread.
Here's some random impressions, in no particular hierarchic order:
- Way too short. There's hardly anything to do as basis to judge the foundation of the game.
- One of the first options I changed was the camera setting to make your character centered on the screen, because the default de-centered one was insufferable.
- While it's not top of the line anymore, I have a fairly beefy PC (5800x, 3080ti, NVMe, 32GB of ram, etc) and I had to fiddle with settings to get acceptable performances. Setting everything to the max ("Alkimia something") was unbearable and tanked performances almost down to a single-digit framerate.
- I was forced to play with a controller -which I really didn't want to, ideally- because I'm left-handed and the demo did not include options to rebind the keyboard. That basically made the M&KB a non-option for me.
- ...With that in mind, controls felt a bit too sluggish for my taste. Not particularly responsive and with a lot of inertia. The character felt almost as if was moving through mud.
- The combat is... Hard to judge at this stage? It doesn't feel satisfying (and I'm not entirely sure that's just "by design" because you are supposed to be a newbie) but at the same time your initial strength is if anything even a bit too effective. I had no particular trouble killing everything in just a couple of hits. Then again balance could be entirely different from the final game as you are playing another character here.
- Visuals are overall nice enough, but it's a bit too soon to say if I'm sold on the overall production value. Faces are detailed but they have a plastic-like stiffness in them that doesn't make for great eye candy.
- Nothing of particular relevance to say on the writing or the voice acting. It didn't feel either remarkably good nor offensively bad. Serviceable and decent enough to not be too distracting, I guess, and it kinda feel like Gothic all things considered.
I have some perplexities, but despise the front of having the devs asking for feedback I'd be incline to guess that whatever is in this demo at this point is set in stone and won't change for the release.
P.S. For what is worth, apparently the developers confirmed on Steam that invisible walls are presented only in the demo to limit the explorable area and they won't be a feature in the final game.
