My main problem with SKA is how long it goes on for. The world is fantastic, the writing is fantastic, and the developer of this game is certainly to be congratulated for the game that he/she has completed, because it is certainly a great showing. However, it drags on for an incredible amount of time. How anyone is supposed to play through this without becoming acquainted with the skip text button is beyond me, as this game easily seems to run into the 60 hour mark, or even more if you carefully read everything.
It is also an incredibly hard game. Even on normal difficulty, the game is unrelenting in its difficulty, and you'll die repeatedly trying to figure out how to best approach combat. There is also no handholding as to where you should go, and what you should do, often leading to situations where you wander into an area and get your ass absolutely handed to you, with no real idea where you are supposed to go otherwise.
I often found myself at a loss for what to do next, and the game outright punished me for this, making the bosses harder because I wasn't being efficient with my time. I thought this was somewhat disrespectful to me as a player, because I want to explore and experiment in a big open world, and yet the game seemed uninterested in this play style.
I can't say I actually completed the game fully, I spent about 4 days in 4 different play sessions trying to advance, and got about half-way, before I tapped out. At this point in my game, the difficulty had become so intense that I was just dying repeatedly, and the only solution really offered was to restart the game with improved stats, and I had absolutely no interest in replaying 30 hours of the exact same content just to come back and continue again.
As to the heroine, I really like the "corrupted out of necessity" trope, and I think the developer really nailed this aspect. I wish the game had been more economic with its and my time, so that I could have experienced more of it, but alas I don't think I will be finishing this game, or seeing the ending, as I simply can't see myself spending another maybe 40 hours trying to get through it on newgame+ or spending many hours just being frustrated with the interaction between difficulty and progression.