I'm in Chapter 5 and should be finished in a few hours. Some quick points:
The Good:
- Great atmosphere and music
- Surprisingly good character writing for the most part
- Fun, challenging combat
- Character progression gives enough room for 2+ replays
- Crafting, but it's kept simple and clutter is avoided and what you can craft actually matters
- Some good C&C, but...
The Bad:
- ...basically no moment-to-moment reactivity
- Travelling between districts can get annoying quickly, because
> weird map-layout with many passages being locked
> respawning enemies that are almost impossible to avoid and that give no experience
> curing people again and again
- Some weak character writing and questionable story moments (the romance, Mary etc.)
- Some dialogue options for our Dr. Reid are straight-up stupid
- Sometimes dialogue plays out no matter what, not accounting for what has happened or has already been said
- Outcomes of story decisions are difficult to predict
- Game tries to push player into "eating" people with loading screen-text and tries to make things go bad with unclear options during important dialogue
> inelegant, heavy-handed game design
I still mostly like it, but I feel like this one would have been better off if it had tried to tell a more straightforward story. The dialogue structurce is weird and doesn't really mean anything for the most part. The open world is also kind of fake and the player is pretty much pushed to do things in order. It usually works well for what it is, but in this case I think just like the story, the map would've worked better if it had been more restrictive.
Edit: Oh, and the ludonarrative issues are obvious enough as people have pointed out. In my opinion the chosen setting is a real problem as it's clearly not a fantasy setting, but the Guard of Priwen is everywhere and eventually you have not just masses of Skals, but even Ekons showing up in the open. Another issue I had with the narrative was that our character simply continues with his life as if nothing had happened whereas Mary turns evil/insane. Skals are mostly murderous maniacs, except a small community which are inexplicably peaceful and then there are also numerous moments where it's unclear how Vampires actually work. There are not real consistently applied rules as far as I can tell. Characters even recognize that at times ("don't really know how Vampires are actually made", except of course sometimes they do know). Eh, too many issues as that that wouldn't require some more thorough analysis.