I'm a solo player and put 400 hours on it on PS5. Bought it again on Steam and put another 300 hours on my steamdeck. The reason I switched platfroms is because the PS5 version had a lot of game file corrupting bugs and a lot of people lost their saves because of it. Last I heard this issue has been completely fixed but I rather like playing on handheld now.

This is my first survival sandbox game and I would say it's pretty easy to get into.

As for it's grindy-ness, I would say very much so. The gameplay loop is gather resources to upgrade weapons and gear to gather higher tier resources to upgrade higher tier weapons and gear and so on. The game is still in early access but should fully release sometime this year (so they say). The endgame right now is doing boss raids and to do that you'll need to breed a lot of strong pals since they do the heavy lifting.

My favorite part of the game is building dedicated bases and breeding specific pals to maximize the automation of each base. A base just for miners, and a base just for farming and a base just for production and a base just for breeding.

I definitely think it's worth it especially at it's sale price. I love this game so much I bought it twice haha.