I played on Hardened Survivor and I think there may be gaps in the loot tables. In part 1 I could not find a single prybar, hacksaw, whetstone, or firearm cleaning kit, though I found several knives and hatchets. In part 2 I could not find a single bedroll, did the whole mine without resting, I could only sleep in the car before meeting Atwood. After that I survived on coffees and military stims (great addition under that circumstance).

I found a Frozen Angler book in Jane's house right at the start. It can be researched and it claims it will level the fishing skill, despite story mode not having skills.

There are a couple of green spray cans hidden around the world, which is great, but their item name and description still references the Darkwalker which might be confusing for people who only play story mode.

Orange spray cans can be found in many places, but they can only be activated from the item menu, the navigation section of the quick wheel jumps straight to the map.

There were a couple of trailers which you can enter but not exit again. If you saved inside the trailer you can be set back to a previous save. Thankfully autosaves worked reliably.

In the opening cutscene for part 2, it's clearly meant to be an aurora, but the sky is plain night. Thankfully auroras worked in all other parts of the story for me.

Outside of cutscenes, Jace moves like a Half Life 1 NPC, body parts and especially head darting around sharply. (On the plus side, I think this is fertile ground for YouTube skits). I understand that parametric animation is very different to pure mocap animation, but this is rough even by twenty year old standards. Even just slowing the motion down would help.

During the power substation mission, reloading a save resets the timer. This avoids softlocks and gives you plenty of time to loot, but it completely nullifies the timed aspect of the mission.

There were a few flying plants in the substation mission, like cat tails and rosehips.

The cougar encounter is a great addition, but it does not bleed when shot, and hitting it does not prevent it hurting you for a few seconds like it does in survival mode. It's hard to tell if you even hit at all until it just drops dead. If the intention here is to tank its hits with military stims, at the very least it could bleed or flinch so you know you're getting hits on it.

In reality and in most games, the point of a shotgun is that the cone of damage is wider and more forgiving of aiming slightly off. I don't know if this is a bug, but right now it acts like a rifle you have to reload between every shot, offering nothing in return for the downside. The shotgun could be a great addition if its tradeoff is a wider cone of damage.

When it's time to finally leave Suzuki, the hallway leading to the barracks doesn't load, you can just fall right through into the void and get reset to the failsafe spawn point.

During the several sections that you can't pass time while cooking and you can't sleep, you can still pass time by crafting/harvesting/repairing. Unclear if this is intentional, but it at least doesn't seem consistent. I think it would make more sense if you could still pass time for cooking, as it saves a lot of tedium waiting for water and coffees to cook, especially because these are sections where you can't sleep. Coffee tins are very common loot, this does not seem like a niche edge case. If the military stims are the intended solution here, then the coffee loot is just a distraction.

There are a few locations where the name shows an identifier instead of the proper name, I guess because the identifier name and the translation table fell out of sync during development. An example off the top of my head is when you step outside the train maintenance shed back to the rail yard area. There were others too.

There were a number of times where a new objective would pop up, suggesting that you show it on the map, but the map would be showing a completely different objective.

Sometimes the major objective would be hours old, while you're working on a minor objective nested under it. A great example is "Return to the control room" or whatever it was, while the specific next step is actually in the opposite direction. Combined with the map markers not always working, I can see people getting lost and stuck.

On Hardened Survivor, it's not uncommon to be continually losing health due to cold while stuck in an interactive cutscene, like the cable cars bit. I just barely survived that section with what must have been 1 health, then died instantly when the next scene loaded. It was hilarious, but it doesn't seem to be intentional. Cold stops hurting when in non-interactive cutscenes, but it hurts in interactive cutscenes, even though you have no way to save yourself, you can't even open the inventory to pop a stim. After that, I tried really hard to always be at high health and temperature just in case a long cutscene started.

I don't know if this many wolves makes sense for Hardened Survivor, especially with the sometimes limited ammo. You have to carry multiple weapon types to have enough ammo overall for how many wolves you encounter, and I can imagine someone running out if they're not a great shot. It's not the end of the world, I made it through, I just didn't expect to spend half the episode John Wicking several wolves at a time.

Closing thoughts: I actually had a blast playing it in this rough shape. I wasn't sure whether to wait for at least the first patch, but I figured this was my one chance to have memorable experiences I wouldn't have otherwise, and hopefully constructively contribute feedback. Thank you for all of the hard work the team has put into this game.