>>22877>>22878You have pretty much nailed all the points here. CotL feels very rushed not just in its story flow, but also overall execution seeing how many problems and bugs it on release and still have that the devs are still ironing out.
The village component is quite primitive even compared to Animal Crossing, with the worst offender being that the aging mechanic does not add much to the gameplay other than grievance over having your top acolytes becoming unable to perform tasks and eventually kicking the bucket, with you having to bury them personally every time, because the cultists apparently cannot be fucked to do it even when they can already clean up crap with the janny station. The traits in theory should have enabled the devs to add dimension to the characters, but on practice the lack of trait-specific dialogue as well as insignificance of trait bonuses themselves render their point moot. Also task assignment in general is fucked as technically you can assign particular tasks to your dudes, but they will not spend time doing their assigned errands for long and would soon return to pray at the shrine instead.
The dungeon crawling phase on the other hand I found to be more solid, but unless you go for the hardest difficulty the rank-and-file enemies except the elite cultists are going to be too slow to pose a serious challenge, especially given that their attacks are heavily telegraphed. The lack of variance in map layouts is also kind of disappointing, with follower rescue maps always consisting of literally just one room that also always looks almost the same way. The apparent absense of portable usable items and loot other than resources like in BoI does not help with making it feel more diverse either.
In conclusion, unless devs give the game the Brigador treatment (release expansive content patches that overhaul and expand the base game) to patch up these issues as well as provide modding support, CotL is going to stay an okay-ish novelty title that derives a certain appeal from the premise and cutesy art style offsetting it, but definitely not a GOAT as it is.