izigame.me

This is a very good 20 hour game, is the short of it.
Gameplay is incredibly crisp and I fell in love with it instantly. As many have pointed out, the free demo will very quickly let you will even like it. The demo allows like 2 hours of content, and the save is even loadable by the full game.
While playing this game you will feel very damn cool. You will also feel like a massive fool at times. It's amazing when those two feelings are mere seconds apart, because despite having just killed a mob of enemies and successfully reloaded every single weapon, you have face-planted into the ground. Only demerit here with gameplay is the boss fights are a bit... underwhelming? They're not bad, but they are not very hard nor mechanically intense. A bit of a blessing and a curse, as on one hand I wanted a bit more, but on the other I'm also terrible at boss fights in most games. The only boss I had trouble with I figured out was the easiest with a silly cheese strat that made me feel like I was morphing into a cheese wedge.
The music is beautiful. The only issue I have with the music is some locations use their own forced... not even soundtrack, but more like ambiance. Considering how long I was in some those areas, it can get kinda dull. However when in areas the cassette player is available, there's a total of like 1 hour of music when they're all unlocked. The music has found its way into my Spotify playlists, it's just beautiful.
Visually, game is quite lovely. The artstyle is very pretty, and I at no point thought that something didn't look great. (Note my experience with the demo did have a strange graphical bug, but the full game didn't have it.) The only gripe I have here is the camera. Some places the camera will move to give a specific view of a zone, which is great most the time. However when backtracking, it can result in enemies you can't see. The atmosphere of all the locations is amazing. Characters can also get quite expressive too.
Technically the game is quite sound. I got stuck in the ground only twice, and the second time was entirely my fault. I only encountered maybe a handful of bugs, with only one of them I could consistently cause. Besides the one I could cause every single time I wanted it, I encountered 5 gameplay bugs and a harmless UI bug. In total I got stuck in the ground twice, left the camera behind twice, and had the weird progression lock. (I did something very strange and I can easily see how that broke the game, exiting and loading fixed it.) The UI bug is sometimes a quest will be in the logbook twice, but it fixes itself and doesn't cause any instability nor loss of function.
Progression wise the game is decent. There are massive jumps in capability spread throughout the game, and they all feel great. Only thing I wish is the game either was like 2 hours longer after reaching peak capability, or gave the capability a bit earlier. A New Game+ might also help this, as I would love to replay the game with all the tools at my disposal to see how cracked it would be. I only went grinding for resources once, but that's because I wanted to do it all at once. Normal gameplay provides an adequate amount of resources, especially if you don't want to upgrade weapons you don't use.
Now the story. The story is terrible. No, not the quality, the content. The quality is immaculate, but this game is the only piece of media that's put me on the verge of crying. I will shamelessly admit that there was a point where I had to lie down because I couldn't see from teary eyes. It's a shame that the story will be such a small part of this review, because to me this was pretty big plus. It's terribly great, 10/10.
Quests. There's a lot of fetch quests and running around the world. There is a fast travel system, but it isn't convenient all the time. I didn't find that awful as I liked moving through the environment, but I can see how players won't like backtracking and going to places they have been before for simple fetch quests. The rewards are also not great, but eh. I mostly did them for the world building and it making me plan routes through the map.
Now, with being only a 20 hour game for doing most of the game's content (I am at time of writing missing just playing more blackjack and cooking more buffs... and dying a lot), the big question is replayability. The story isn't going to hit as hard, but the gameplay will still be crisp. I'm pretty sure runs could be done with a specific playstyle/weapon/goal in mind.
I doubt it would ever happen, but if the developers came back to this game I would buy a DLC without any hesitation. A New Game+ would be welcome as well, as I mentioned with being able to play the whole game again with all the bells and whistles. I don't see the need for a boss rush, since the bosses are more of a story telling element than a gameplay one, but I wouldn't be against it as it would probably have wicked speedruns.
It's a wonderful game of a coyote mom just trying her best. It's not a perfect game, but the things that make it wonderful easily outshine the bad.