I do wish the story and the girls story progress more. Too much time wasted for side missions and mini games
I'm here for the story, so I agree. The heist side mission was story critical. It being an unskippable minigame probably wasn't great for a lot of people, particularly given how opaque some of the hints were.
That said, the mechanics may matter later. Consider:
- Dreams are a useful longer term reward mechanic, though we don't see most of them being dumped into repeatable dreams. I'm not sure why that's the case, but I suspect we're getting more gameplay dreams, and the developers either don't want to block those, or can't solve the issue where they don't block. Given the scheduler collisions we already get, and that some of those have relationship consequences (which are easy enough to repair), I feel like they may be phasing them out of certain rewards.
- Getting a potion recipe as a reward solves this problem, because it's a daytime solution. Even if the potion knocks us out and we dream/dreamwalk. IMO, it's a neat solution to an existing problem. I'm not sure if they plan to give us a dream potion, moving repeatable dreams there, and possibly adding missing replays, but it'd be a nice idea.
- It would make sense that the potion setup could be used to make a consumable at some point. I suspect this may be something that'll happen, given the nonsense with the fridge, library shelves, and cupboard. It's the first lost and found to have any real value after we've found it (such that it is). We're just holding the rest.
My only real gripe with the potion mechanic is having to redo it each time. We can skip (not sure what we miss in terms of rewards), but I'm looking for an autocomplete in the book (for known potions, ideally tied to persistent storage, instead of per save).
It'd also be nice if the items from 'Lost and Found' had some longer term gameplay value, and given how the phonograph was described, I suspect it might. Not sure how that'll shape anything.
-----
I'm guessing nobody is having issues with the heist, as looking back since it released nobody's asking about trying to 3 stars it. I made notes on my way through this time if anyone is stuck. I saved before the maze component, and I'll go back to get a pathing solution for it at some point. Getting 3 stars for the other parts is easy.