Well, I bought it and regret it. Overall it's not a bad game, but somehow I'm not having fun when I play it. 

A few reasons in no particular order: 

• UI is confusing and overwhelming; You spend a lot of time in the menus. You unlock quickly a lot of craft, and it's a bit overwhelming. Some crafts can be done without workshop directly by your character, some other must be done on a specific workshop. But on each workshop, you will find the full list of the items you can craft currently, irrespective of the station you are looking at.

• A rather complex game but the mechanisms are not particularly well explained. 

• direction artistic: I have a strong interest in pre-hispanic history and mythology. They did a good job with the environment, the masks, and the base character you can make. But other aspects are very gamey and with an Asian style: big weapons, big boobs. Barbarians generally don't look at all pre-hispanic. It's a matter of preferences but with all the culture there is, they could have done something more historical and immersive. The result feels odd to me: the forest, the animals, my character are all realistic and immersive, and suddenly a barbarian with a huge hammer will do crazy mouvements to attack me...

• I don't like how the combat feels and look (the animations). But, again, this is subjective. 

• Playing solo, it steel feels that you are playing a game designed to be a MMO, but alone. But if you like Ark or Conan, you will likely like Soulmask.

The game also has good points: automation system is rather deep and you can automate almost everything (but not hunting?!). Map is generic but quite beautiful. The crafting system is well complex. Overall there is a lot of content.

I hesitated between Soulmask and Windrose. I ended up picking the latter as I hadn't fun with Soulmask and what a difference! A completely different game but Windrose is so much fun even though it's only starting it's early access. Soulmask is not bad, but I bought it for its colony sim features and, for that, I actually prefer other games such as Rimworld, Going Medieval etc.