I read through the details, and it looks like there are lot of good ideas, but I’ll be interested to see how many of them survive actual playtesting.
Personally I would say they are making some minor but correctable mistakes. Like, they want this to be survival horror, right? That’s a headline feature/theme they keep talking about – they mention Resident Evil and Silent Hill.
Now, one of the major reasons survival horror works in video games is that there is never, ever any major RNG in it. The moment RNG gets seriously involved with survival horror, it stops becoming horror, and it becomes a numbers game, a game about mitigating RNG, not about survival horror. Survival horror relies on you suffering because of surprises, mistakes, overreaches, and so on, not because you got screwed by the dice.
And as such, side-based initiative, in which they explicitly say you can end up with monsters taking multiple turns in a row without the PCs being able to respond, is an incredibly bad fit. It’s a dreadful fit even. What it means, in practice, is that you can be playing it full survival horror, playing it smart, playing careful, and still quite likely get absolutely TPK’d because, essentially, of a single dice roll (arguably two). There are ways to mitigate this, but they didn’t mention a single one of them. In fact they only seemed to mention factors which might make it worse. I guarantee you that absolutely any trait, item, or class that gives the PCs better initiative rolls is going to be basically required as a result, certainly by the second time you play it.
I’d also add that their whole approach to “usage dice” and random encounters is going to have a similar effect, albeit a far less pronounced one. They won’t get the focus on survival they want, because the whole game will likely become about mitigation of RNG, and players will just become increasing cautious, because unlike in most survival horror, the PCs can and probably should simply retreat once they’ve got enough loot to justify their expedition. There’s no apparent requirement or real benefit to “getting to the end”, whereas survival horror relies on that to keep you pressing forward.
I think what they’re actually accidentally designing isn’t a “survival horror” RPG, it’s more like an “extraction shooter” RPG, which is a very different thing. There’s overlap in that both are like high-stress, high engagement deals, but they’re tonally different and require different mechanics.
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