It needs work, it really doesn't feel like a finished game.
The UI is very clunky, and its clear that it was put together without much forethought. Its very easy to look at the way the UI is implemented and go "why can't I view the name of these items in the planet/station inventories? Why do you need to open a new window to view not just the sprites of the items but also the item names when going to upgrade your ship? Why is this missing mouseover windows, and why is this other menu or inventory not missing them? Why are so many of the resource sprites nearly identical recolored boxes when the icons of them in some menus are greyed out and don't show the name of the item, meaning you have to chase down the box in some other menu to determine what it is? Why are none of the crafting or cloning cooldowns visible from the navigation screen where they would be most relevant as your ship travels over a long period of time? why is it not displaying this information? Why can I not scroll in or out on this map I've pulled up? Why is there no custom equip loadouts to quickly equip my character with gear I want them to use rather than manually dragging everything over every single time?" Etc. etc.
In a similarly clunky fashion, the gameplay is very stilted. There are two timer types which punish taking too many turns, but often a first floor will be large, empty, and with mazelike corridors and there is only one elevator to the next floor. This not only incurs punishment by the aforementioned timers, but it also means I've spent a bunch of time looking around not fighting anybody or finding anything and that's boring. Why have a first floor at all if its so big and empty, why not start the player on the second floor if that is where the action happens, this Isn't a slow burn horror movie and the mission are meant to be repeated, you don't need to build suspense or pad the start of every single mission with a vapid first floor, drop me off in an area with items and enemies, I want to PLAY the GAME when I start a mission not look around in an empty map.
For a game with strong themes involving Corporatism, selling items to get capital is also very obtuse, in fact, there is no currency across the systems at all, only per faction reputation and item to item bartering exists. wouldn't it make sense to have, say, some sort of universal value tracking system, you know, something that the corporations could use as a metric to determine the value of items and the missions you do for them? Some kind of, oh I don't know, unified currency that could be traded for goods or services? No, that would be silly, instead how about this : "I'll give you this wheelbarrow of cabbage for your crate full of ore! Oh sorry, you aren't in the market for cabbage this season? Good heavens, forget I even asked!" What is this, medieval times? It's supposed to be a futuristic sci fi capitalist hellscape and they haven't invented the dollar? Sure man.... Luckily a mod in the workshop amends this utterly bizarre "design choice" and adds a real time stock market to boot. Still, not a good look for base game 1.0 if features need to be patched in by the players through mods to make the game feasible or really just coherent.
On top of this, missions can be a bit buggy, just last time I played it was a "protect the crates" mission and although there were no more enemies on the floor, the mission did not update to indicate me having defended the floor, same on the second and third; even after there were no enemies in sight, and all of the crates were still intact and.... nothing. I sooner died to the timer than figure out what was wrong. A lot of times I feel I'm waiting for a quest trigger to progress a mission forward instead of just playing the game and going with the flow, again the gameplay is very stilted. It comes across as not quite reaching the status of a real roguelike or a real extraction game both at the same time. Think of Caves of Qud, pretty good roguelike right? And then there is Sulphur, a pretty good extraction game. But both these genres mushed together? After playing Quasimorph, I'd think maybe its not a good idea.
All in all, I feel like this game can be summed up just like one of the in game food item tooltips : "Chunks in Jelly". Its got some substance, sure, but in a sloppy, chunky kind of way that is ultimately hard to swallow. Though I guess there is still hope it gets updated to fix these problems, even as I write this I see a few of the UI issues are being looked at, however, it did just exit early access so, who knows.
