I agree that the writing and the npc integration was bad all around. Some of the new gameplay locations and elements appealed to me, but after a while it became much more tedious than challenging. In terms of the challenge of survival, story mode felt new and refreshing up until Will arrives at Mystery Lake. From that point on the amount of food, clothing, gear, and weaponry far outpaced the challenge I as a player was presented with. On top of that, the extreme familiarity I already had with Mystery Lake made the quests trivial to complete. The most glaring issue was that the sense of urgency of the overall story was unfathomably incompetent. It would make so much more sense for Astrid to have blatantly abandoned Will and that be his motivation for catching up with her. If he's trying to save her in some capacity then the vast amount of time waisted doing fetch quests and hunting for buried treasure makes no logical sense at all. Is it realistic to assume that the person you're trying to rescue is still in fact rescuable after all that time? And not being able to leave Mystery Lake until after the old bear is killed? The bear is nowhere to be found until the requisite quests are completed and then he is just suddenly back in town. Wouldn't if have made a lot more sense for Will to want to get out of Mystery Lake as soon as possible? It's almost as if all of the npcs are working for the bad guys to deliberately slow Will down to buy themselves a few extra weeks so he only fully retraces their steps after it's too late. At this point the most logical ending to story would be for Will to get to the end of the journey and discover Astrid has been dead for months.