Wow. I expected this to be good, but not this good.

I'm coming into this as a casual roguelike fan, I'm no cookiecutter or masochist but I enjoy a good challenge with fairly deep systems to explore. This game delivers on that with a perfect blend of ease of access, and what seems like an impressive amount of depth. But as I'm no mechanical expert (pun intended), I'm going to comment on the other aspects of this game that blew me away:

SOUND
This is a big one. I can't overstate how good the sound design is in this, no other roguelike I've tried is even in the same world as the quality you can expect from this. Nothing feels out of place, every sound is crisp and informative, and the ambiance makes this one surprisingly immersive. As far as I can tell, all the sounds have an actual source in the world instead of being a looping track, from the activity of the little scavenger robots, to the UI log updates, to the whirring and churning of machines in the factory. They're also spatial, which is such an underutilized thing in this genre, with realistic attenuation as you move in and out of rooms. It's one of the top 10 best sounding games of all time in my book; I'm not exaggerating.

GRAPHICS
It's gorgeous. It's hands down the prettiest game in the genre, even beating Caves of Qud by a wide margin. The blend of sprites and ASCII is executed perfectly, the colors are coherent and tasteful while being very informative. The animations are plenty and top quality, while never being too noisy as to take away from the information you need at every moment. Stacking system corruption almost feels rewarding due to the glitchy effects you get, and all weapons and effects feel impactful and unique; you subconsciously pick up on what weapon types were fired by who, how much damage they dealt and how well they hit based on the particle effects alone.

And the UI is also one of the best I've seen in a video game, never confusing and overwhelming despite providing you with everything you want to know. Everything is where you expect it to be and behaves how you expect it to, and when it's unexpected (due to innovations) the game communicates it through subtle means like slight animations and color coding.

STORY
I can't really speak much to this either, as when I'm typing this I've only played 20 hours (continuously, except for a few hours of sleep mind you), but it's engaging as all hell. Every log entry feels like a treat, every conversation is interesting, the worldbuilding is effective and sucks you in immediately. I want to know everything there is to know about this world, how it came to be, and what is about to go down. You can tell the creator of this game knows they hit the mark, because you have to work to have the lore given to you; there are success/fail chances on reading the entries, which can have real consequences for your run, and more important/enticing lore is harder to hack. It makes me want to do runs solely focused on investigating the lore.

GAMEPLAY
So I'm starting to get into it now. You roll/fly/run around as a robot, constantly rebuilding yourself with parts you find laying around, or which fly off enemies as you damage/destroy them, and there's plenty of those (to put it mildly). What sets it apart from most rpgs/roguelikes is that there's no progress in the form base stats or experience, apart from unlocking more equipment slots as you progress. You are what you wear, in a very literal sense, and you can do a 180 in how you play whenever you feel like it. If you find a room full of huge armored wheels, you can drop your all your legs and start rolling around instead. If you find a special chainsword (basically a long chainsaw) you don't have to respec into melee or anything, you just change how you approach the encounters and what parts you prioritize.

You use energy for movement/attacks and some utilities, so you need power cores to keep the flow going. They determine your capacity and recharge rate. You use material as ammo and for replacing your components, which drop off enemies, destroyed machines and from reprocessing parts. As you'll be replacing parts all the time, often in the middle of combat, it's critical to keep an eye on this as if you get your legs blown off and decide to keep firing instead of replacing them, you can quickly get caught out as you crawl like a snail. If you lose too many parts, your core is exposed to attacks, and your core getting destroyed is what's going to kill you in the end.

This system of entropy, parts constantly breaking and falling off, is something I normally wouldn't like in a game, but here it's pulled off in a beautiful way. You attach them, but don't get attached to them, if you know what I mean; as you're rolling/flying/running along, replacing parts becomes second nature and by the end you're churning through parts at an increasingly worrying rate constantly adapting your strategies based on what you find. The game handles pickup/equipping in an intelligent manner, so you don't have to spend any time comparing and thinking too much about what parts to rebuild yourself with. When you walk over a part you can press A to equip it immediately, and G to pick it up to your inventory, and the brilliant part is that if you don't have any free slots this will replace your existing part of the same type as long as it's stronger/in better shape, and if the part you take off doesn't fit in your inventory it will even compare it by the same rules to the parts there to determine which one to drop on the ground for you. This is such a time saver, especially towards the lategame, where instead of hovering over the item to see if it's relevant you run over it and try to pick it up. This convenience allows you to play at a much faster pace than similar games in the genre, and enables you to focus on the more important stuff.

As you're not spending too much time looking at stats, you're free to evaluate the world and the bigger picture. Intel is gold in this game, and can help you avoid unfair fights that will eat through your parts and help live to see another level. Tools that can inform your decisions are not to be underestimated. A device I found surprisingly helpful was the "machine analyzer"; when you get close to stationary machines, it automatically hooks up to the network and reveals a couple of other machines on the map, interact-able and not, gradually giving you a rough layout of the area. Terminals can also be hacked to give you information about current squads in the area, recall task forces that are coming to investigate, or other useful information such as what exits there are and what operable machines are at that floor. Knowing is more than half the battle, and once you get a feel for how extermination squads and ongoing investigations work, you'll learn how to avoid them or prepare for them turning what could have been a detriment into a metalgrinder instead.

That's all I can say for now, I might have written this review a bit early so I didn't want to touch on the gameplay too much in fear of misinforming anyone. I've used what sounds like hyperbole when I used the word "best" so often, but it's true; the quality and polish of this is on a whole other level. I promise you, if you like this genre, even as a beginner, you couldn't have been in better hands.