It's not a pure extraction shooter, but the general idea (that is kinda a core concept to the genre) is that if you die you lose whatever you took with you when you went outside your shelter. When you die the game respawns you at your shelter and in theory you should take another set of gear you've stashed in your shelter to go out again. Alternatively you can go out with nothing and do what is considered "zero to hero" as in you use whatever you find in the wild.

It's a learning curve when you've never played extraction shooters because it requires you to think about your actions in a way you normally don't need to think about. In most games you can just take any fight to see how it goes u because it if goes bad you just reload and nothing is lost. But because there's no reloading in an extraction shooter you have to think about if it's a fight you're willing to take, if it's a good idea to push forward or go back to store what you've found. There's a constant question of risk vs reward.

I would recommend starting a new game every time you die until you feel comfortable with bringing back gear into your base and then restocking from your stash when you die. There should also be a trader somewhere in the first area who might be of help when you're looking for specific gear.

The game is somewhere between Stalker and Tarkov but I'd say it's more Tarkov than Stalker. Stalker is more focused around mutants, anomalies and artifacts, none of which are in this game. The only things that separate this game from Tarkov is the lack of online component and no map timer. Tarkov is also moving towards a zoned open-world so I think the comparison with Tarkov is perfectly fine.

And the developer has mentioned both as inspiration:

In terms of other games, Road to Vostok takes inspiration from titles Stalker Anomaly, DayZ, Project Zomboid and Escape from Tarkov.

That's literally the entire purpose of a demo

I feel like demos have become longer recently than they used to be. It used to be that you could only get through the equivalent of a level or two, now it's more like they last up to 2 hours - the same period you might play and steam refund a game to demo it that way.

Seems like a very healthy development in gaming.

I also really enjoy the combat. I like how you can chain the quick combat into the turn-based combat to start with an advantage by stunning enemies. And since you want to abuse weaknesses in turn-based combat, neither forms of combat overshadow or weaken the other despite quick combat being inherently easier and safer. It feels very fluid and well designed, to the point where I was surprised to learn quick combat wasn't a thing in the original game.

So far the only thing I don't enjoy is missions where you need to protect people. Like one of the first few missions where you need to protect the kids as you fight off the group of cats, I've lost many a battle purely because of bad RNG where they just all beat up the kid three turns in a row and there's nothing I can do about it. And since you can't use quick combat to get an advantage on story encounters like that, it really is all down to luck. And good fucking luck if you run into an enemy that explodes on death later down the line.

Admittedly I'm (stupidly) playing on the hardest difficulty despite not being great at turned-based combat, so that's probably mostly a me issue lol.

Yeah, parrying needs serious work. I don't think I've been able to make it happen even once.