As a lover of the Zone (having played the hell out of the other STALKER games), diving into this game at launch felt like coming home. Was there jank and frustration? Absolutely. I installed a mod that allowed for console commands, which let me:
* Force despawn hostile NPCs inside a safe zone to progress a significant quest
* Enable God Mode to kill an enemy with an insane amount of health, in a certain situation in which I didn't have enough ammo to kill him (even with 90% headshots)
* Enable noclip and flying to retrieve artifacts that spawned underground

9 days after launch, the devs drop a patch that fixed at least 2 of these things, in addition to fixing other major complaints from the community:
* Loading shaders before the main menu taking forever
* Bloodsuckers sucking
* NPCs acting strangely
* Crashes, soft-locks, and hard-locks
* The insane price of armor repair (and the low price of selling loot)

Nine. Days. I recommend you go look at the patch notes; it seems like they touched on almost every major chunk of code in the game. All of this while the dev team has gone through, and is going through, a lot (Слава Україні; Героям слава).

Steam says I'm 80 hours in, but only about 70 of those are Active Gameplay: I've explored a little more than 1/3 of the map, I just hit what I'd describe as "Act 2", and I'm still having a blast.

I could write another three paragraphs, but what it comes down to is this: If you miss the Zone, if you love Immersive Sims, if you love action-adventure horror RPGs with light survival crafting elements, **get the game.** Especially after Patch 1.0.1. I'm excited to see what comes next from the devs, and to check out the rest of the Zone.

Blowout soon, fellow Stalker.

I love the game, I love the idea of the game, I love the setting of the game, I love a lot of the concepts of the game. If the (solo) dev had worked with a team, or sold the game to a studio, or kept up support, I believe it could've been great. The vestiges of greatness are there, but it's clear the game still needs a lot of love to even become a cult classic. It breaks my heart, but that's I can't recommend it.

~40 hours of fun. My only complaints are small QoL-style things, but they're forgivable for the amusing characters, nice little tech tree, delightful dialogue, interesting story, and fun combat.

This might be my GOTY.

It's dark souls, but you can take it home to your parents or show it off to your kids. The depressing lore is there if you bother with dialogue; there *are* multiple "weapons" (technically movesets and the associated damage/speed changes) if you either put a shell on the end of your fork, or use one of the "+speed -damage // +damage -speed" stowaways; there's a limited magic system...

It's great. The mechanic of puzzle / precision platforming is introduced gradually in a way that doesn't feel like the classic "difficulty curve of a brick wall." The maps are rich and varied. There's reason to go back and visit some areas. There's design decisions like spare upgrade materials so you don't *have* to do everything.

There were twists I saw coming, and twists I didn't. The characters were memorable and fun, but no distracting from the gameplay. The plot served the progression and the maps served both.

If you're a fan of soulslikes, this is a breath of microplastic-filled water fresh air. And if you're not, maybe this can change your mind.