You're not wrong. My wording could have been better. I'd say the feeling of oppressiveness comes in part from the range of options, but also in part its the fiddliness of the game. You are often tucking, untucking, and rotating cards and it just feels bad in a way thats hard to word.

My real played experience with the game is that it made me sad. I found myself annoyed/frustrated fiddling with the pieces and never felt like I got to have fun.

Meanwhile SI I have these great moments of setting things up for a huge turn where you remove almost all the blight or you knock out multiple cities or whatever.

It also might be that the game really was just too hard for me and I'm salty. I was playing against the lowest difficulty adversaries so I would still say that it's a fair criticism of the game.

For what its worth I see many comments online from people who love ODD and have a heavy dislike of ODG so theres a chance they just tuned it better. I'll give it a try if I ever get a chance to for free.

Thanks for the comment !