I've been waiting for this for months and bought it at launch. And honestly it's exceeded my expectations. It's probably my game of 2020 thus far.
I've played about 12 hours thus far and I'm really only now starting to have to do large amounts of travel to speak to the specific person I want. Even then, there are at least 2 other major areas of the map, I've not done anything in and at least 1 other are alluded to that I haven't found. And I have 3 pieces of unsorted evidence that could be a part of an entirely undiscovered plot point/crime.
Even the collectibles are fun and genuinely interesting and help to flesh out the weird pseudo-gnostic cosmogony they have going on.
@humanity: Visual Novels are a clear influence. But then so are Quake 1/2/Counterstrike (you can bunny-hop and surf) but nobody would call it an FPS. IMHO It owes more to Japanese adventure games in general and the early works of Suda 51 (up to and including Killer7), + stuff like Diary of a Spaceport Janitor, Crypt worlds or those weird queer twine games that end up with a lesbian carving bespoke cursed sigils into their arms in order to become some sort of crystallized tentacle capybara.
There are a lot of conversations, but it's your exploration, evidence gathering and interventions that drive the plot forward. And it's definitely possible to miss stuff (I missed an easy clue because I turned right instead of left at the start of the game and didn't rediscover it until ~7 hours in. And the game handled it reasonably gracefully)
@fear_the_booboo: Early on it definitely feels like you're tripping into new clues just by doing every possible conversation with someone, purely due to the sheer volume of evidence. But as you progress the exploration and crime scene investigation become more important. And towards the end you definitely need to discern "If person A was here at this time, then that implicates them for crime X, but exonerates them for crime Y, meaning I need to find a new working theory for evidence B" problems.
It's also possible to "fail" conversations through poor dialogue choices and screw up your chances of getting specific pieces of evidence out of a character. I only realised this relatively late in the game when I had 3 choices on one line of enquiry with someone, but offended them on the first option and the other 2 disappeared. With hindsight, I realise I'd probably done this previously and not noticed.
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