It's a beautiful looking game where you play as an early hominid without any sort of tool skills, but as you go through and inspect and overcome your fears, your neurons expand and you are able to do more and more skills - like pass items between your hands and craft rudimentary tools.
The world is full of dangerous animals, which encourages you to use your senses when travelling, with smell/hearing being extra sensory nodes to focus on, with doing so increasing your neural powers, so it's a very organic way of levelling up, by locking these advancements in a family clan line.
The bit of tediousness is that you have to manually groom and mate and pair up and have babies every generation, optimally six which is a lot of cut scenes to obligate you to have to skip before you go explore.
The reason I'm flagging this as "done enough" is that now that I have figured out the world (herbs to heal any ailment) and become deadly with a spear, it's one button quick time event combat - nothing can touch me - and even if I was completely caught off-guard sleeping on the forest floor and a saber-toothed jaguar chomped me hard, I know a berry that I can mash into a salve for that. That leaves the rest of the game as training neurons to being able to walk upright and not get sick to your stomach when you eat certain mushrooms.
It's got a pretty deep advancement tree, but that process takes some learning because you're dealing with a limited amount of growth space (a 2D grid) for your colony. You run into issues with needing more power, or more cots in what you establish as the sleeping quarters, and no real easy room for expansion without clever planning and envisioning the eventual design, all while working within the randomly generated structure of the planet.
I can see why it's got an "overwhelmingly positive" review on Steam, it's pretty fun. I think I'll just shelve this one in the play again cabinet, but I need to end the current game. My world spawn had a lot of water above the starting position, and I've been struggling from the start with that primarily (and everything generally) as I learned. Wasn't killed ... but it was going to be bleak going forward for the crew.
... well I couldn't resist building again with what I knew and got to what I think is a pretty solid mid-game. I will need to research a little more what to do to deal with things outside of my initial zone, as everything else is "hot".
The story unfolds via one-time-one-choice-only dialog with townspeople, and I'm guessing the story arc is something you do over again because some of the responses would make no sense in the context of knowing nothing.
Times are rough, travel is slow, superstition is high and the townsfolk are weird, but it's a brilliant bit of dystopia as you have to pick and choose who you help since you can't help everyone with a perfect depressing soundtrack to go along with. Like a choir from a psych ward.
I might play it eventually to completion, but it's not much of a "play" and more of a graphic novel.
Running scares animals, sound scares them, smell, predators, other shots, pressure in areas from other animal deaths. Finding animals is a problem to itself, but then you are also needing to take shots that you are confident enough will be kill shots so you don't have to chase a wounded animal for a mile to end it or leave it lame.
This is probably a game that I will play forever because spending two hours of my time hunting a gigantic plains bison that I end up not getting was still pretty exciting because I know I set up the right hunting blinds and I found where it drinks and it's horns look like a gigantic handlebar moustache.
