I have extremely mixed feelings about this game. This game has incredible cinematography and the general narrative is absolutely compelling. Yet, I don't think I can, in good conscience, recommend it to anyone.
If there's a direction they can push too far, they probably did. I might have just gotten unlucky, but I had like a half hour of this game where it was just sx scene after sx scene, and it was absolutely exhausting. There are content warnings in the menu, but i think this game also highlights a big issue with content warnings. I saw the content warnings and assumed I could handle it, but there were several times I had to step away.
Playing the game itself is also a bit exhausting and wasn't very fun. The game consists of watching a clip, then clicking on something or someone in the clip to find another clip with the item or person. This was also the case with Her Story, except that Her Story is significantly smaller and you choose words instead of things on screen.

My biggest annoyance was that there is something in the game that requires rewinding the same clip and playing it over and over again until you rewind in the exact correct way. This was a really cool mechanic, but at the same time, it felt weirdly difficult to do (I was on steam deck), and required listening to the same few seconds repeatedly. Including during times of content that was quite uncomfortable.

This game has a lot to say about art and the nature of art as well as the juxtaposition it has towards order. It goes into several really interesting topics, but you probably should discover that on your own.

Overall, the game is cool, and it's definitely art and beautiful art at that, but it just was a bit too much in every direction.

Also this game is a horror game, just so y'all know.

I have opinions about this game and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it.

Let's start with the good things. First off, the lore of this game. The world itself is very cool. It feels extremely unique in it's world, which not a lot of games in it's genre can really say. I joked while I was playing that this is a reverse Star Wars, but I think that statement does honestly stand. Both take sci fi and injects it into the past. This game takes sci fi and injects it into a tribal world. And it gives an actually pretty good reason for it. I won't get into spoilers but I think this game is pretty clever with it's approach on its own existence, and it is probably the only game you'll play where you fight a robot alligator with a bow.

That brings me to the combat system. The combat is a pretty solid system that doesn't feel fully realized. Don't get me wrong, it is incredibly fun to fight things in this game. Seeing a Thunderjaw (one of the strongest enemies in the game) and planning out how to get it to hit my traps, while stripping the parts off of it so it'll kill me less violently is so fun and makes for a fantastic way to fight enemies. It's every multi-legged boss fight in other games, packed into most encounters. It's super fun. The problem lies with the expandability of the arsenal, or really the lack thereof. I got the shadow carja bows about 10-20% into the game and to my knowledge, those are the best bows in the game. I'm sure that they expand the arsenal more in the sequel, but I was kinda hoping for more. Especially because the trip caster is underwhelming and most elemental effects other than fire are not very good against most enemies, or just aren't worth the mental focus rather than just ripping the guns off every enemy.

I found the stealth sections to feel a lot like the far cry games where you just pick off each person one at a time at a distance while you slowly encroach through the base. There's a certain satisfaction that Ubisoft made with that system and it's very well emulated here.

For me, the most enjoyable parts of this game were fighting enemies that were way too big for me to fight. The Sawtooths at the beginning, then the Ravagers, the Deathbringers and then finally the Thunderjaws are a delight to fight.

While the lore for this game is great, a lot of the story is... Less so. I won't get into specifics but there are a lot of inconsistency across the characters and a lot of wild goose chases that happen in the game. It honestly just feels a bit bloated at times, with npcs telling you to go talk to someone, you talking to them, using your tracker to find some tracks, kill a bunch of people and then get whatever they were looking for. Similarly the map in the game is a chaotic mess. I really don't need to see where herds of striders occasionally live on the map. I know you can filter it down, but it just is one of those things that feels unpolished and I think shouldn't have been there.

Speaking of polish, it's very easy to tell that there was a lot of polish in the character interactions in the main story, and a lot less polish in any character interaction outside of it. This is especially distracting and unappealing when talking to side quest characters. For me, I could not focus on most of the dialogue in this game because the face movements were so bad. Aloy, for the most part is fine, and the main characters outside of her have pretty good face movements when speaking, but side characters....

There was this one person who started talking about how his sister was killed and how he needed me to get some machine part or something and the whole time, he was starting at me while his head was bowing down lower and lower. I wasn't expecting to get a Kubrick stare while someone was talking about their dead relative, but the head movements for the most part were about the same quality. I had npcs talking with no mouth movements and vice versa, mouth movements that looked like they were speaking a different language and head movements that just were wild. The funniest to me was towards the end when you're confronted by one of the bbegs and he tells you about his ideology and you argue with him, saying his gods are all fake, and he just nods and looks like he agrees when the talk is focused on Aloy.

Maybe it's not distracting to others but that sorta thing distracted me from the story of just pulling Aloy from location to another location for little reason. It also felt like A lot had little say in her actions despite the fact that her characterization is a badass who does what's good because they want to. It felt so weird.

The last thing I wanted to say is that the overall message is a good message in general. I think that alone does make the story better, but not a fantastic story still.

Overall I enjoyed this game, but my nitpicks were enough for me to not love this game, and the unpolish makes me glad to hear that they delayed the sequel to avoid crunch. That sorta thing makes me hope that they are prioritizing a polished non crunched game, and that sounds great to me.

TL;DR Game is good, world building and combat of the game is fun, but the too open world, cheesy dialogue with weird head movements make this game not quite the polished gem it could be.