I'm gonna borrow a phrase from Yahtzee and call this really ♥♥♥♥♥ juice-milkingly good. This game is excellent from beginning to end and there's basically nothing I can criticize about it other than maybe the readability of status effects and knockback directions, but with the rewind mechanics those issues are tiny inconveniences. You should play this game, no qualifiers here.

The writing is top-notch all the way through with consistently funny jokes while still getting across a really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ good and engaging story with great characters.

The campaign took me a little under 19 hours going for as many optional objectives as possible and completing about a third of the optional dream missions. There's also a level editor with steam workshop integration and some more levels and objectives I didn't get, so I expect to get quite a lot more time out of this game. If you care about dollars per hour of content, I'd say this definitely has good value in that regard.

Most negative reviews that aren't whinging about the "woke agenda" or whatever say that it's a puzzle game as opposed to a turn-based tactics game, but to me that's a false dichotomy. I think these people are using "turn-based tactics game" to mean "carbon copy of XCOM". The store page for this game is pretty clear that this game is not XCOM, but the fact that this is a tactics game feels pretty clear-cut to me.

For any given turn or encounter there are effectively endless ways that it can play out. The rewind button isn't so you can go back to find the "one single intended solution" but to experiment with different approaches and to see what's possible with your abilities. If you had to fully commit to every move this game would be basically impossible or would have to be massively dumbed down. I personally really appreciate the huge strategic depth that the rewind button enables.

One way I can describe it is that TBW builds on some of the ideas that made Into the Breach unique but that weren't really used to their full potential, and I hope more games in the genre can follow suit, I really really really like the way this game tickles the problem solving part of my brain without punishing me for solving problems.