Been playing it a lot in the last couple days and ill adress some of this.
- you can embrace bums and send them on their own quests, like henchmen in wow or you can use them to make them stand on some platform to solve a "puzzle". Didn't use them, had no need.
You can embrace npcs at the hubs, they have better starting stats. You can use them for puzzles, but careful because if you set that option they can also step on traps. they are useful in dungeons as they are immortal and can tank some damage plus deal some and finish monsters, as a mage they are useful. as a fighter not sure.
- you've got talents a la wow, although out of a few dozen talents I only found 2 useful ones. Others were like +3% electric damage. They're randomly generated.
Talents points are very random on level up, a small chance dependant on intelligence. There are some stones that allow you to bypass the requeriment and pick any in the tree, plus also make the talent free. Some of the talents are extremely good, others are incredibly shit. They should be improved by a lot. For example there are some that give stats every level which are awesome, extra inventory which is a must have, etc.
- you have stats a la Diablo with +5 to stats at every level up. One is social (persuasion), one is for damage, others are for some shit like lock picking or equipping gear.
Actually dex helps with traps and locks, int helps with talents hacking and reading books, charisma gives more spell damage and mp, str gives more damage and allow you to equip better weapons, which are sometimes needed to break walls.
- you have blood management and flashlight batteries management
Blood managment isnt much of an issue unless you do a long dungeon romp. flashlight managment is kind of the same. Blood allows you to regen mp, otherwise to heal you need elixirs, so its really important. flashlights are kind of meh, they are useful exploring some levels tho.
Yeah but they only exist in dungeons, not in the hubs, which is strange as fuck. most of them are easy enough, but the simon says one needs to die the fuck out.
love how failing to disarm traps damages the gear in the container and hurts you, the game still shows you what you are missing out on, which makes you want to invest in disarm traps.
- "puzzles" (find the switch and flip it)
No puzzles on dungeons, but in the game they keep getting trickier and trickier as you advance. Its understandable they are easy at first, never gonna understand why people judge puzzles on a game by only trying the first or second one, they are suposed to be easy for the player to get familiar with the mechanics.
- randomely generated dungeons with a shitload of random gear, but no room in the inventory
Talents give you extra inventory space, also you want to go down several levels for the dungeon to start being a challenge. experience and loot improves a LOT, but the game becomes harder and harder.
- some nice spells/abilities like turn to mist, shapeshift, teleport, etc. They sounded cool from their description, but I didn't have time to unlock them.
mist is sneak mode + no need key to pass gates. teleport can make some puzzles easier, its kinda like mark and recall but with duration of it in the seconds.
Never seen a game that tries to do everything that much.
Dins curse arguably, but yeah, and im loving it for it.
And if you're going to play it, you'll probably want to wait for patches. Shitload of bugs. And no v-sync, so there's a lot of screen tearing sometimes.
Ive yet to find any.