I'm speaking as a player who hasn't played any previous versions - my experience begins and ends with 090n. These are my honest thoughts so far.
--- The Good ---
Overall vibe - First off, the game is stellar graphically, in terms of art direction and overall feel. The graphic design and atmosphere is spooky and somewhat unsettling without resorting to cheap jumpscares of almost any kind. There's cool stuff to see and find, interesting events, and in the middle of all that, there IS pants-shitting scary stuff too, but it's rare, appropriately spaced, and not in-your-face at all. It's the first and only "horror" game I've ever enjoyed, and I enjoy it a LOT.
Meta-paranoia - It's outstanding. In any other horror game, it'd certainly be used as a way of telling the player "something scary is happening, you have to go search for it and suffer a mini heart attack before you can save/sleep again!". In here, anything can happen. Catgirls propped up a couple of paper aliens to prank you? A spaceship is flying overhead? Maybe a couple of mechanical aliens set up shop at the hole and you need to go check out what's happening? It feels so much less like a "haha, get fucked, it's time for jumpscares" and so much more like a "cool stuff is happening. go see it", and I love it to bits. I especially love it because, again, something scary CAN be the reason for meta-paranoia - but the fact it almost never is something outright scary just makes the rare actually terrifying moments hit much, much harder. It makes the experience way more enjoyable - feels like the character is actually a dude in the Swiss alps witnessing weird things, not just a virtual vehicle to scare the person playing the game. 10/10 mechanic and implementation.
Physics - It's great how just about anything can be done through physics. You can place a drive on the slot by holding it with the R key and clicking the slot, sure, but you can also "grab" it and physically drag it through 3D space into the slot. Same thing with placing drives in the drive box, or placing the drive box cover back on, and dozens/hundreds of other things. It is the definition of "the extra mile" - entirely unnecessary if the only objective was to make things work with minimum effort, but so, so fun and rewarding to play around with, and to know that the system is just there, that you can engage with it at any time if you wish to. It breathes life into the game in a way I can hardly express with words alone.
Performance - I've experienced no FPS issues whatsoever while playing this game, even though my specs are nowhere near top-of-the-line, so that's always a plus.
Variety - There's just so much stuff. Besides collecting signals and maintaining all the different types of equipment, there's cleaning up to do around the base, fixing up the walls, selling the extra junk, and even exploring around the map. Hell, I hadn't even properly engaged with crafting until well into the 3rd week of story mode. I thought it'd be just a barebones system meant to create or modify a couple of items, only to learn that it can actually be used to make so much of what I was purchasing previously, and so many cool things are locked behind it. All of the little extras make downtime very rewarding, pushing the player towards exploration and engaging with all the game has to offer. And that, I'm afraid, leads us to the bad.
--- The Bad ---
Time management - I can't speak for earlier versions, but time management on default settings in 090n feels awful, truly. There's a good reason I hadn't engaged with crafting before week 3, and that's simply because I had absolutely no spare time whatsoever. Learning mechanics and controls as I played, collecting signals, going out to get floppy reports, fixing transformers, fixing coordinate towers, fixing servers all over the place, and finally cleaning up the base to a bare minimum condition with the remaining hour or so before I went to sleep for the day. It wasn't uncommon to hope that no events happened during the night, so Kel's sleep wouldn't be interrupted and I had a couple of extra hours in the day to actually do things other than the daily tasks. It's just way, WAY too much busywork, with very little meaningful way to mitigate most of it. I even knew beforehand that Kerfur Omega could greatly alleviate a lot of that workload, but had absolutely no spare time to explore the map and try to find how to assemble it. I did all I could to optimize time management - buying Kerfur (which still got stuck rather often, requiring me to go and collect it on foot, but I assume that's entirely unintended), using breakers to disable portions of the workstation for faster signal download/processing and less transformer degradation, calibrating the satellite dishes regularly, always stocking up on fuses to decrease the maintenance trips to radio/coordinate towers... Nothing was truly enough. So how did I get enough free time from week 3 onward? I simply decided I'd no longer go collect the floppy reports anymore. A simple enough decision if I wanted to engage with the rest of the game and not just roleplay as a desk worker, but it's very telling that I had to ditch part of what the game considers a minimum daily contribution in order to actually do the other, cooler things. My immediate suggestion: change the three floppy reports to a weekly task instead of a daily one, or require only a single floppy report per day, to make it a simple, quicker round trip. I'd also like to suggest a moderate decrease to the degradation rate of servers/transformers/towers as a whole, as it is a near-certainty that every day there will be several failures when it comes to the many pieces of equipment we have to maintain, and it gets old fast.
Physical upgrades - The modules for the main console feel great to install (and it's quite funny when you try to hot-swap them the first time around). Transformer upgrades are fine too, there's only three of them and neither has a single upgrade, so it's just a matter of buying 6 for each and installing them the next time you do a transformer maintenance run. But the server upgrades feel egregious. Some servers have none, some are fully upgraded, some have just one... And you have to check them one by one, every time, and order a couple more upgrades before each run, for over twenty separate locations (plus the massive server cluster at Alpha). "Paid 75 points and drove to the location? Very good, one of your satellite servers is now fully upgraded. Only 23 more to go, many of which are entirely unupgraded, with several of which breaking down daily. Better get to work!". Honestly, I've seen other comments mentioning this used to be a simple upgrade you could purchase on the computer's upgrades tab, and would personally love to see it returned to that, because it feels like very unrewarding busywork.
Radar - No issues with the radar system itself, but too often I see a signal, drive out to try and find it, and am met with nothing, with no way of knowing if the signal vanished, if the entity simply moved away, or if it's something invisible to the naked eye. It would be nice if there was a way to prevent this - either by being able to remotely access the radar interface somehow, or by actually locking onto a signal instead of simply locking onto specific coordinates, along with a warning when a signal is lost. Apologies if there is such a way to do such things, as I'm trying to play without spoiling myself and haven't found a way to do so yet.
Frames - Setting up a GPU miner frame is a massive time and money investment, requiring about 4360 points for a complete setup (assuming you can source the scrap locally, considerably costlier otherwise), and also necessitating some exploration to find the recipe for coolers, prior to which you can only have about 4 GPUs on a frame as it limps along, barely generating any points. Given the extraordinary upfront point cost and the fact you need to both find the cooler recipe and craft them yourself, I feel like the obscene transformer degradation caused by a running frame is unjustifiable. Having a single fully-upgraded frame running will force a player to do a full transformer run every two days, even if all transformers are fully upgraded, even if the main console is powered down entirely. This means frames are colossally annoying to use despite the enormous investment required to get them running in the first place. Honestly speaking, between the time spent accumulating about 4500-5000 points, the opportunity cost of using those points for a frame instead of buying out the entire store, and the need to find the recipe and craft the coolers yourself, I'd say the the player is already investing a LOT into this endeavor, and the transformer deterioration increase should be negligible at best. Currently using frames feels horrible unless they're being powered by the electric generator, and even then, there seem to be much superior ways of obtaining a steady stream of passive points (farms being the obvious choice).
Reliance on outside sources of information - Many of the game's mechanics seem entirely esoteric and unknowable without reading up on them through a wiki or similar sources. I don't mean small events like using the toilet at 03:33, nor things like clipping into the backrooms, both of which can be stumbled upon naturally without any prior indication. I mean things like rituals, which require an exceptionally complex set of actions, being all but impossible to discover normally by simply playing the game. Naturally, the game isn't finished yet, and it's possible that future versions will include ways for a player to find how to access such features/secrets, so this is less a complaint and more a statement of "I hope in the future the player can find most of what the game has to offer simply through exploring and playing the game itself".
The pipe minigame - A very minor complaint, but the pipe minigame for server fixing is awful. It takes much longer than any of the others, and it isn't interesting nor demanding in terms of brainpower, just time-consuming and boring. I currently have it disabled, and don't think I'll turn it back on unless it is changed somehow (speaking of which, big thumbs-up for allowing players to disable minigames individually).
---
I'm sure there's much more to be said, but ultimately I think this is one of the most unique games out there, both in scope and in execution, and I'm very excited for what the future has in store for it. It is a truly unique experience, unlike anything else I've ever played, and I have nothing but praise for the devs working on it.