Long, Engaging, and Empty
It took me ten hours over two sessions to play through this and get 100% completion. My first session was on an earlier version and so I had to deal with slow brain alterations. After 6 hours of playing (though not very efficiently) and seeing the annoying brain combinations required to get all of the reactions for my two newest items (I think it was the cat?) I gave up in disgust and ended my session, knowing I would spend another half hour just getting those combinations done.
I did have all of the research done by this point, so I was only being held back by getting through the rest of the story (admittedly, I often intentionally chose not to research the alpha team's stuff so that I could work on get more reactions with my current set of items rather than being distracted by any new items after the next story progression).
Two days later I came back to all of these updates (some significantly faster brain alterations, yay!). Seeing some of the fixes, I'm glad I didn't go for finishing this on my first session, since I suppose I would have been blocked by the boxing glove + jaw issue.
With the faster alterations, getting specific reactions became a chore rather than a massive undertaking, but still an annoying time sink. For most items, if you were already mood, you would need to lower your mood just to get the full spectrum of base reactions for the item, and then have to raise it back up just to get the advanced reaction... And perhaps even more annoying if hunger also needed to be manipulated back and forth. I did notice that fortunately low humanity was not a requirement often, so most of the time I just kept my humanity floating around 90-100 and I was fine.
I found the story engaging even though it was rather predictable (especially with the obviously non-chronological ordering for the notes). Hell, it was enough to get me to come back and sink another four hours into this game. But the end fell VERY FLAT. I could understand some sort of obsessively researching on and on as he slowly goes insane (or more insane), but just an "I'm done, this was dumb, I'll walk out of here eventually" was dull. Even after 100% completion there isn't anything like a cutscene of the character leaving or a true indication that the game is over besides seeing the achievement.
I did notice one bug (or I guess "feature") in that the advanced reactions that supposedly depended on the specific specimen doing things didn't care at all that my zombie was a fresh recruit from the cage. As long as the required actions had been performed by any zombie at any point in time, the advanced action could be done. I would suggest not fixing this, because doing so would only slow the game down significantly (once I discovered this bug, I abused it heavily and yet still took 10 hours to finish... ugh).
The damage achievement was a bit ambiguous on what you need to do for it. It takes 70 clicks on a single zombie to achieve (every type of bullet hole on every body part except fatal shots). May your soul rest in peace if you happen to accidentally kill the zombie for some reason, or confuse the damage achievement with the maiming achievement.
