I'm playing it a bit.
It feels a bit like Monster Hunter in that you need to get your head around certain concepts before getting into the real game and if you try that first, though the game does attempt to block progress before you get at least a few necessary items (but also gives you a way to ignore all that) I guess you'll get frustrated.
You have to first understand the backpacks, crafting items, cooking food, stamina/hunger/thirst systems, light sources, all that jazz. Once you figure it out it seems simple enough and you realize resources are quite plentiful (and like enemies resources also respawn, fish get back to the fishing spots, trees bear new fruit, etc) to make survival itself easy (like always having clean water available in town, which you can take with you in waterskins, and being able to sleep in town without the threat of enemies so you can spend all the hours repairing gear).
It only gets more complicated when you factor in other elements like enemies you meet in the wilderness or when you want to plan for longer journeys, quests, or whatever may require you to do things like craft rations and not just simple food to have it last longer (different food spoils faster or slower, though the rations don't give any bonuses beyond satiating hunger so you'll still want real food as long as you can have it). Combat isn't really Dark Soulsy like it looks, there are slight similarities but this is a CRPG game first with mouse based controls and hotkeys for skills with cooldown timers. It feels more tactical RPG and less pure action, though you'll still need to dance around enemies and attempt to avoid or block attacks manually (drop your backpack in combat, you aren't very agile with it on, lol, just make sure you have the items you want to use on you and not in the backpack!).
It's kind of like a modern Gothic game in that and in how you need to pay trainers to teach you weapon skills and improve your effectiveness in various aspects. And you do start out pretty shit. The story's pretty silly in the beginning but I guess it mainly wants to give you the idea that you can do whatever the hell you want, just past the initial sections I'm given the choice with NPC dialogues to head down three wildly different paths, which I can ignore of course and just go do whatever. If you want a Planescape Torment style game all about NPCs, they never promised such.
I like it so far, it feels quite polished though there are some elements I didn't expect like the towns and other areas having loading screens rather than being a fully free open world. Technically the game seems fine other than not being able to maintain 60fps on my PC so I locked it to 30 and left it at that. It's probably an engine issue rather than hardware requirements being too high, I imagine even people with lower specs than me get similar performance as my GPU and CPU usage isn't maxed most of the time but it still dropped frames. Whatever though, the 30fps lock works. I also prefer playing without voice overs, old school.
Still, it's too early for me to speak for the complaints some people list, they could become apparent later on (then again many of those complaints didn't have many hours into the game but judged it all the same). It's worth noting however that the more reviews the game gets on Steam the more positive the result seems to grow, it started negative (or borderline), then mixed and it's now comfortably in the mostly positive label. Some of the early complaints seemed quite over the top, people talking about not being able to kill shit with some crappy club they crafted out of wood when you can find nicer stuff by exploring the starting town. Not to mention the game's not just about going on a killing spree anyway.
