went back and actually finished it. it left me with a worse impression? so much stuff is non-obvious ("curses" are never explained anywhere I found), easy to miss, or just janky (I bought more buildings than are actually possible to build). There's auto-scaling but not for the loot you get so you will fight for your life to get a shitty tier 1 unique when you're on tier 3. and the ending did not satisfy me at all.

I like the concept of like "hey you're in the perspective of a Prince not just a murderhobo" and there is legitimately good roleplaying in there. there are interesting design decisions. they just don't work over the whole course of the game. the good news is that the core tactics RPG fighting is still pretty OK? it's relatively quick. it's interesting. managing your meagre resources is good, wiping out a clustered group of enemies with a single fireball feels awesome. it's just the less-OK news is that the long term game makes that feel repetitive. by the end i was eager to click the "Yup, let's make a deal and get out of here" button.

the first like 5 hours, i was totally into it. i liked a lot of changes from the previous Spiderweb formula, especially no more fiddling with trash in fear of missing a magical set of boots, and i'm always up for some city building in my RPGs.
going into dungeons to get the right resource for my fort, building shops, and earning new equipment as i built more forts was really fun! battles felt tough but fair.
and then i hit a wall. i lost too much to theft, and building the anti-theft buildings took too much upkeep for me to build new buildings. i cranked down the difficulty so i could proceed through more of the story and through some truly ridiculous gauntlets. my goals for my fort started feeling more abstract, the skill trees on my characters seemed limited, and i couldn't keep half the factions straight.
it's not that the game is bad, it's just the interesting, new stuff didn't quite work and so the old formula took over.

side note: there's an author's statement about how this game represents how he feels about relationships and politics and how he wants to express the inner lives of his characters and, uh, that goal was not achieved. the writing isn't bad - it is compact and evocative - but your family treats you mostly with contempt. the politics are the same "easy immoral choice to allow slavery vs hard pro-moral choice to stop slavery" you can find in literally any other fantasy RPG. i found that disconnect between what the author intended and what was achieved deeply weird.