I've been avoiding previews for fear of spoilers, but I'm curious about the game world. I know it's some kind of pseudo-70's setting, but is it entirely realistic or are there any kind of fantasy or sci-fi influences?
The game world is from Marat Sar's tabletop campaign which ran for 13 years, starting from an age analogous to Pharaonic Egypt and proceeding through the centuries to something not too distant from ours. The history emerged with the campaign. It's not exactly pseudo-70s although the visual styles are definitely like it. Some things are very much like in our world -- political movements for example -- but some things are very much not; there was no WW2 and no Holocaust so fascists never became the comic-book bad guys they're in ours; there was a Communist revolution but it failed before anything like the USSR could emerge, so neither is Communism. There was no Stonewall and no gay rights movement, so society is in many ways more conservative than ours, but there are countercultures pushing against it. Technology is different too; there are motor vehicles but they're not cars, they're how they would look if you made a 1914 motor-car with 1970s aesthetics.
And yes there are fantasy elements. The most immediately obvious one is the structure of the world: it consists of stable islands called "isolas" in a formless nothingness called the Pale; it is possible to traverse the Pale but it does very strange things to you. I'm sure there's other stuff there too that will throw you for a loop if you entirely discount the fantastic or the supernatural as possible explanations for things -- but it's not in-your-face; I don't think anyone's going to start shooting fireballs or laser guns.
let me get this straight.
Stat checks are random, and there are two kinds of them - more important, and less important.
Less important checks can be repeated (which is a band-aid solution of save-scumming), and more important checks don't matter because your character succeeds anyway, albeit in a clumsy fashion.
No, it doesn't work that way. Red (non-repeatable) checks aren't necessarily more important; it just means you only ever get one shot at them. Some white checks block progress in the main quest -- you'll have to find a way to pass or circumvent them even if you're absolute shit at them. For example -- and I don't think this is a spoiler at this point, it's been thoroughly explained in various previews by now -- to get the case started you need to get the corpse out of the tree; to be able to do that, you need to examine it; and to do
that you have to not toss your cookies from the smell. That's a white "Endurance" check, and if you have shit physique, you will need to be either lucky or creative to pass it. So that's one very important white check.
I'm going to let someone else answer re: repeatable checks because I don't know enough about them, but for the "fail forward stuff," no, you do not "succeed anyway." Again, the example I used in the post above is you trying to punch someone and them catching your fist - that's an example straight from the trailer. The example from the previews that Kyl highlighted (lady in wheelchair) was a very technical success that introduced a more ruinous complication than the original problem. That is the whole idea behind failing forward - the consequences of your failure snowball into a bigger challenge with higher stakes.
Failing a red check means that you didn't succeed in your intent, and something else happened instead. Usually it's something with immediate negative consequences -- you embarrass and hurt yourself, you abjectly and hilariously fail at impressing the girl with your game, the bullet does not go where you meant, causing a ... complication with what it
does hit. This introduces unexpected complications as well as of course defining your character. There's nothing like embarrassment and failure and how you deal with them that truly defines who you are. Do you square your shoulders and clean up the mess you made, put on your shades and make it look like you meant it that way, apologise profusely and try to make amends, or something else? That's what the "what kind of cop are you?" schtick is all about.