I did for an hour, until it pissed me off. Firstly - I do play survival games, and I'm actually quite tolerant of bullshit meters - stamina, durability etc. but... it's like every annoying thing in RPG getting cramped into a single game.
While the artstyle remained honest to the great trailer released ages ago it also forces a constant close zoom making everything on screen rather huge. Maybe it's meant to alleviate the fact that entire game is split into a plethora of absolutely tiny levels, and I mean "single room two corridors" tiny. To make things worse, every level is a load screen, sure on an M2 drive they take but a second, but do remain a constant nuisance, especially in a goddamn pixel art game which might've had all it's sprites cramped into a PNG atlas few megabytes big. On top of that, usually one third of a level is obfuscated by heightened near plane, like hills and so on, so that only silhouettes of characters are seen through them. Yet, worst of all, someone decided nothing says > multidimensional < like slapping dynamically changing chromatic aberration effect on top of it all, obviously on a huge scale, since everything is pixelated to begin with. Travel between locations is made via minimap, somewhat in vein of Fallout 1/2, with occasional random attacks, and (of course) the travel speed is also painstakingly slow.
The game sure aspires to be a full fledged RPG with dialogues, and so those are presented in Disco Elysium style side bar and offer both written descriptions and regular speech. None of them seem to be voiced by any length, but it's not that I mind. The writing however is a whole separate thing. Now, I loved PS:T, MotB, and even the setting in PS:TON. I can appreciate alternate reality or multi-dimension themed fiction when it's interesting, but here? While it's possible to come across an interesting NPC, most of them just spout mumbo-jumbo, which despite being relatively short (for a loredump) mostly namedrops shit at random ("Marduk this Dharma that") to a point that made me yawn. Every environment interaction has a retarded slowdown - pressing (not even holding) a button once makes a tiny square fill up first, before anything happening...
Mechanically, the game bombards player with possibilities - there are several tabs of upgradable, exchangeable, craftable elements like weapons, armors, runes and what not. Normally, I'd say it's a good thing, but no, there's just so much shit here I don't care about most of it. Honestly - you get like 10 types of throwable items in the first hour, and EVERYTHING has a unique mechanic to it. Weapons deteriorate and break. Consumables have to be dropped and hit (by you or the enemy) to activate. Since crafting is also a thing here, you go around mashing everything that might be destructible - boxes, jars, fences, plants - in a boring attempt to make those tiny levels last longer. Joy.
Since gaming journalism is worth shit nowadays, unlike the reviews say, combat is fairly fluent and has no control issues, but again, in attempt to make it oh-so-hard-and-SOULSLIKE it has stamina meters, heavy attack cooldown points and fuck knows what more. Again, it might've been fine if it wasn't for a fact it's technically a glorified hack & slash, so unless you want to get fucked mashing attack button while your character stands like a bitch and "no stamina" sound plays, you have to run around kiting mobs. Pretty much as fun as cooldowns in a Contra game. Some enemies can deal quite a ton of damage. Punch your lights out in 2-3 hits. From border of the screen. Aaaaaaand there's no save game... So you just get respawned, but the quest is failed. Maybe it's geared towards replayability, but I see no way in hell I'm replaying any of this slow ass boring shit. The first sidequest? Two janky AI escort missions.
The overall atmosphere also quickly takes a hike. Majority of soundtrack seems to be made by the (rather good) ukrainian post-rock band stonefromthesky, however for a reason unknown, most of the time only few droning riffs are being played in loop instead of entire tracks. While the setting tries to be interesting (maybe even too much, given dialogues) it just all falls apart - first character you play is a chthonian void. FUCKING CHTHONIAN VOID. Yet, while some characters pay you respects, gameplay says otherwise - you run around killing little shit scorpions, destroying random cacti, gathering trash and rescuing lost pissants - all the while looking for >> Dimensional Cores << of course.
Overall, just no. I WAS really interested in the game since the first trailer, but while I'm glad it came out at all, after the 3 year hiatus, it's a disjointed mess of tiny bits that just don't make a good whole. Uninstalled.