Your mom does it for the marketing purposes aha
Anyway, took me 3.9 hours according to steam but I beatenered the demo and I believe found every secret.
Not sure why people are saying that it's nothing like Thief. It's not exactly Thief, but it is far from being a casualized power fantasy rape simulator like Dishonored. I think it can be most accurately described as having something like 60% Thief DNA and 40% System Shock 2 DNA. At least on the Full Moon difficulty (highest available in the first EA release,) the power differential between the PC and the enemies seems pretty comparable to Thief - direct combat, unless you have the resources and proper set-up, is punished with swift lethality - but instead of incentivizing ghosting, the game does drip-feed resources such as weapons, ammo, explosive barrels, etc that allow you to eliminate every threat on the level provided you explore thoroughly and exercise an decent level of tactical and situational awareness.
The real time grid inventory and only being able to save at phonographs are major tip-offs that SS2 inspired the game on a foundational level.
1st level is really good IMO, gave me the same vibe as playing Thief for the first time. You start in what appears to be a relatively linear area tutorial area but if you poke around it's actually a multi-level compound with many nooks, crannies, and hidden passages, and teeming with enemies (which, unlike in SS2, do not respawn). Like Thief, there are documents to find that foreshadow dank lore and provide hints about the environment, as well as maps of the area to discover. Unlike in Thief, the map does not show your current position, so you have to use that friend Brian of ours who is quite helpful when we are not too busy drinking and masturbating our life away.
Now, the AI is kind of retarded (slow response time, like maybe double that of vanilla Deus Ex but I could be completely off just vibing here man you get me) but dynamic enough in their investigation/chase behavior to make no area feel entirely safe until I cleared out the entire level. For instance, after exploring a good portion of the starting building I used an explosive barrel to kill a small group of enemies. This attracted three motherfuckers that I had not found/killed prior, forcing me to escape into areas that I had already deemed "cleared" - and I actually stumbled into one secret passage in the process of flight. And even more chaos transpired due to the fact that I did not bother to hide bodies in some of the aforementioned areas - as a result, the guards I ran away from deviated from their normal patrol routes and started poking around the scenes of carnage I had caused perhaps an hour prior. All of that rendered both my initial and subsequent sorties tense like my cock during its hourly sounding sessions.
So the potential for dynamic encounters like that is incredible. Really forced me to explore each environment carefully and try to become intimately familiar with potential hiding spots, escape routes, and chokepoints - since I never knew whether an area was truly safe until I killed everyone in the level. And this is reinforced through the fact that you can only save at phonographs - and that you can only load back to the last save game you made. The aforementioned big compound you start in has just 1 phonograph but you unlock shortcuts to it from other parts of the level like it's motherfucking Dark Souls, motherfucker. (Yeah, I said it, bitch - Gloomwood is the Dark Souls of the immersive sim genre. It's like Bloodborne meets Citizen Kane except neither of those things really. It is basically like Skyrim, if Skyrim was made by New Blood, and actually good (barring lack for support for rape mods.)) Anyway, retreating back to the phonograph rooms to save my progress and stash extra items has been an incredibly cozy experience or whatever
Unfortunately, other 2 levels have not been as complex or enjoyable as the 1st. Both were a much more linear affair with few secrets to find compared to the 1st level. The second level actually makes for quite a nice change of pace, but the 3rd doesn't feel like it really has much of an identity and feels like a worse version of the previous 2 in a few ways (although it could be due to the fact that it is the most unfinished, with one major enemy encounter being under development - so you more or less get 2.75 levels, with the first probably having more gameplay in it than the rest combined)
Besides the phonograph checkpoints, another thing that makes me think of this as as a Thief Shock Souls chimera is the fact that there is backtracking is possible between all levels, sometimes with unexpected shortcuts. Level 1 has at least 2 secrets that will require backtracking from future levels in order to complete, and there is a shortcut by which you can walk your ass from level 3 and back into 1. It's not seamless like in Souls, but loading screens notwithstanding I experienced quite a good feeling of direction, presence, and IMMERSHIN in the GA(Y)MESPACE. Although I hope that the older levels will become repopulated with new enemy placements, perhaps after certain points in the story (sort of like the city hubs levels would refresh in Thief 3 between missions) because otherwise doing nothing backtracking for 10 minutes across 2 different maps for a single secret feels like a bit of a drag.
There are a few annoyances I have with the first early access release. Few mechanics are missing but since there is no information indicating this, you will still be clogging up your inventory space with useless shit:
-Sanity damage does not appear to be present ergo food items that seem to restore it are useless and a waste of space
-Same for loot items you are meant to be able to sell later on like in Thiaf
-Same for the research mechanic ala Shock2, which is hilarious because you require the severed heads of enemies for that and those take up a huge amount of inventory space. Although this does foreshadow a great potential for roleplaying as Jeffrey Dahmer (perhaps I spoke too soon re: lack of rape mod support aha)
There is also one fringe part of Level 1 that looks ridiculously unfinished and honestly I am surprised that it made it into the first EA release given how polished the rest of the build largely is. Finally, a bit disappointed that the assets and monsters that were present in other pre-release footage did not make their way into the first release. They foreshadow a monster encounter in Level 3 but when you get to the place you are met with literal red tape telling you to fuck off and play the rest of the level because this part ain't done yet chief. Could have put a bunch of those wendigo-looking motherfuckers from all the other pre-release footage in there just as a WIP hard encounter thing but damn, go off, sis. Anyway it was a fun way to spends spend 4 hours in the middle of the fucking night
So the TL;DR is that the potential seems to be amazing but it all depends on whether or not they are able to keep up with producing more intricate levels. Levels 2 and 3 make sense as "bridges" between hub areas of 1 and, presumably, 4 (the Market Square, presumably.) But if New Blood decided to front load all of their game design then obviously that's sort of like uh not good fam
