TLDR, I like it a lot in some ways but it's definitely got some glaring issues. I've put in ~8 hours.
One would hope its shortcomings are due to being in development still (I think the Prologue hit Steam in 2018 which means this thing has been in development for probably....6 years?), but the more I play it the more it seems like a choice of design that has some unfortunate drawbacks.
I took my time with it. Explored probably 10 tiles in each direction from the starting town more or less fully. Visited a couple points of interest. Died plenty. Cleared out the first contract (sorta. I sold the Grain to a vendor ><. Gotta let the contract expire and see what happens....)
So I feel like I've seen a pretty good slice of the game and am interested in seeing more. I love the visuals. The sprites, UI and environment are are great. (The animations are so-so and the bip bopping around people do isn't really to my taste but I can overlook it for all the other things.) The sound design is pretty good. Music is nice and medieval-sounding with a hint of gothic. I love the weather effects. It's nailing the atmosphere. There's lots of interesting mechanical crunch to the game systems to think about and play with. The game's attention to detail and injuries and health and toxicity and yadda yadda reminds me a lot of Project Zomboid. SS want to be a survival game as much as anything else so there's layers of mechanics around it. Combat feels meaty and dangerous (I played as the Maiden Knight.) Strategy, using the environment and exploiting the AI all works and feels good like a dungeon crawler should. Dungeon crawling and exploration is pretty enjoyable, tense and tactical. The story is alright. A little generic fantasy maybe. But there's pretty good characterization in the writing and voice acting. The writing is decent to good so far, just a few bits that come across as a little casual. The voice acting, where there is some, I'd give a good B+ average.
That's kinda where my praise stops though, and the problems begin.
The scale is a problem for me. I get why, what they're going for. But there's just nothing in it except for what they deliberately put there. Oh sure, there's plants galore and random bandits and wolves and a little bit of huntable wildlife. But the good content is like tiny islands in a vast ocean of mass-generated tedium, that brings the game down to look like a BYOND game. I only now just kinda figured out I could pan over to the edge of the tile and have my guy path find their way there. And that helps but only to a degree.
It's not just that the distances are so great. It's that they're featureless tracks of generated, soulless content. The only things of note I found the entire time I played, that weren't located at a straight up marker, were a couple of graves that I dug around in for some loot. It's like DF's adventure mode. But where DF's endless procedurally generated wastelands are a fascinating product of Toady's obsession with detail, SS's expanses just feel like hubris and unfulfilled promise covered in some very pretty art.
There is so much space to deal with, just based on the fraction of the map I've seen, that you kinda know that one of two things is going to happen a) someone is going to tediously spend time trying to fill it and probably never succeed, or b) they never intended to fill it. This doesn't really feel like a prototpye or WIP as far as the scale and content of the world goes. I remember when Darkwood was in Alpha, the forest was just one huge featureless woodland. It was boundless and featureless until they revised it and added some structure and character. SS desperately feels like it needs that. There needs to be more things breaking up the wide expanses of plains and forest. Stuff that's too dense to walk through. Lakes and large rocky outcroppings. It absolutely murders this game's pacing. There's the implication you'll be able to ride a horse, which I'm sure will make going where you need to feel less tedious. But it doesn't do anything for all the nothingness and unfulfilled potential of the rest of the world.
This is probably my single biggest issue with what I've seen so far and it hit me not even an hour into the actual game. On this front, I think you pretty much gotta say of the game:

Next, the item durability is a drag. While I appreciate the attempt at "realism" with item effectiveness scaling to its durability....at the end of the day it's still a money and a time sink. And in SS its already feels aggressive early on. Topping off all your gear after a string of fights feels necessary because everything needs repairs, even jewelry, and it starts to add up really quickly if you don't stay on it. That, along with humping cheap loot across a huge map to try and stay ahead of your gear, leads to feelings of tedium as well. It's not that you can't keep up, but that keeping up feels like a job rather than fun.
Because then there's item #3: farming and grinding. The game wants you to feel the scarcity of the economy and yet you're surrounded by endless supplies of things to eat and sell. I haven't needed to really buy food because I just stay topped off with berries while I run around. I feel like selling herbs to the herbalist is honestly faster than humping crappy weapons back to sell to the merchant. XP similarly feels like a huge grind. There's 2s and 3s of bandits and wolves scattered all over the place, but the bandits are worth jack compared to how much XP you need to level, even early on. If you stay on the roads you'll find plenty of bandits and, at least for me, they weren't hard and didn't use up any resources if I played reasonably smart. But it just felt grindy. And repetitive, again because of the copy/paste feeling world you're hunting around in.
Lastly, I already kind of touched on this above, but there's a pacing / difficulty curve issue that comes together with all the other issues. The game makes a point in the tips to say that leveling and stat boosts don't help you nearly as much as new skills and better gear. So the difference between what you can win against and what will fuck your shit up feels pretty stark. 2 bandits, handled properly? 100% chance of victory. 1 single wolf? 50% chance of getting killed. Different but also similar looking bandits at a PoI? 75% chance of being killed 1v1. It makes the range of things you can do feel pretty narrow, or make you feel like you have to grind trash for way too long to try and get some parity. All while trying to make money. And this is playing as what seems like the tankiest starting class, armor, sword and board. Which is probably why I didn't feel the pinch on healing consumables too much yet, as long as fights didn't come down to the last few HP I could regen out of most stuff. Anyways, the bottomline is you need to explore to find books and better gear, and win fights to level up. But to get there you have to be strong enough first, which with no other options than random bandit and animal spawns, means you have to spend an inordinate amount of time looking for stuff to kill instead of going interesting places, eating berries to stay alive and picking flowers to repair your gear. It is......singularly uninteresting. And while I appreciate the whole "save your game by renting a room at an inn" gimmick, if I died on the return leg of a 45 minute long trip and had to restart from when I set out....I'd probably just turn the game off. Again, there's some "hardcore/realism/immersion" mechanics in SS that actively work against it being a game you want to finish.
I'm going to give it some more time, get a little further and see what's out there along the beaten path. (Because the amount of hours I spent off the beaten path didn't yield much.) I'm enjoying a lot about the game and it sadly just isn't done yet. That's EA for you. There's just lots of promise to it on an already enjoyable visual and technical bedrock. But I'm kinda worried some of its decisions are already too developed on to change. And while it's technically and artistically competent AF, some parts of the design seem amateurish or like early work that no one revised or stopped and asked if it was actually helping the game. There's a lot of polish on the game but the "big picture" literally has problems, and that makes me wonder if it's one of those games that will never live up to its own potential. SS is trying to be a lot of different things at once and I don't know if it's succeeding on some of them as much as others. I think it makes for a better dungeon crawler RPG than it does open world survival game right now, and the dungeons are wwaaaaayyyyy too few and far between.