For a busy adult, this game is a focused, time‑bounded commitment rather than a lifestyle sink. Expect roughly 20–30 hours to finish the story, which translates to about two to six weeks if you’re playing 5–15 hours a week. There’s no endless endgame treadmill, and once the credits roll, you can comfortably consider yourself “done.” The structure works well for 60–90 minute sessions. Chapters, day breaks, and safe rooms give you natural moments to stop, and frequent autosaves plus manual saves mean unexpected interruptions usually cost at most a few minutes of progress. You can pause anywhere outside brief transitions. The main catch is narrative complexity. The game jumps around in time and perspective, with a large cast. If you disappear for several weeks mid‑campaign, you might need a little time to remember exactly where each character stands. Still, controls and objectives come back quickly. It’s a solo, couch‑friendly experience that respects your schedule as long as you can carve out focused, episode‑length chunks.

This game asks for a solid, sustained level of attention whenever you’re actually playing. You’re tracking enemy chatter, distant infected noises, and line of sight while scanning rooms for supplies or hidden threats. Stealth encounters reward careful planning: deciding who to take out first, how to move through tall grass and cover, and when to risk breaking stealth for a quick, violent push. Gunfights and melee scrambles are short but intense, and you’ll want to stay mentally present to line up shots, dodge swings, and improvise with whatever you’ve got left. Between these spikes, there are slower stretches: walking conversations, environmental storytelling, and light puzzles like rope physics or safe combinations. These moments give your brain some breathing room but still invite you to notice details and absorb the story. It’s not a game to half‑watch while scrolling your phone, yet it’s also not a dense strategy title. Think of it as a show that asks you to sit down, plug in headphones, and really pay attention for an hour or so at a time.

From a skills standpoint, this is quite approachable. If you’ve played any modern third‑person action game, you’ll get the basics—aim, shoot, crouch, crawl, throw items, and craft—within the opening hours. The game teaches its systems gently and offers strong aim assist and difficulty options if you want a more story‑first experience. Where mastery comes in is how you string everything together. Understanding how enemies patrol, how sound and line of sight work, and how different tools combine lets you turn messy scrambles into clean, satisfying takedowns. Learning dodge timing makes melee far less scary. Knowing which weapons to upgrade and which skills match your preferred style—sneaky, aggressive, or somewhere in between—pays off across the whole campaign. The nice part for busy adults is that you don’t need to chase perfection. You can complete and enjoy the game without mastering every nuance, yet if you stick with it, you’ll clearly feel yourself improving and see encounters play out more smoothly over time.

This is a high‑intensity experience, more in mood than in raw mechanical difficulty. Combat and stealth sit under a constant layer of dread: you hear enemies talking about hunting you, infected shrieking from somewhere nearby, dogs tracking your scent. When things go wrong, encounters can turn into frantic brawls where you’re dodging lunges, firing desperate shots, and scrambling to heal. On top of that, the story is deliberately brutal. It leans into themes of grief, revenge, and cruelty, and it rarely lets up for long. Cutscenes can be emotionally wrenching, and even quiet exploration is colored by what you’ve just seen and done. Many players report needing to take longer breaks not because it’s too hard to beat, but because it’s a lot to feel. Difficulty sliders and accessibility options help you dial down the mechanical stress, but they don’t soften the subject matter. This is not a light, relaxing wind‑down game; it’s more like watching an intense drama or horror film you need to be in the right headspace for.