I just bought this game in the Winter Sale.
It came as a big shock to find I was not allowed to remap the keys. I bought it because it got such a positive rating from players. No-one mentioned a lack of key re-mapping in their reviews.
I play left-handed. Mouse in left hand, numpad for the right hand. WASD is always substituted with 8456. Q becomes 7, E becomes 9. There's plenty of other keys around for me to remap everything to my "usual" (preferred) layout. But I'm not allowed? Game breaker in this case.
Trying to get my right hand across to WASD has proven impossibly awkward.
Invariably my fingers stray, so I end up on ESDF instead of WASD. Having to look down to check where the key I need is, breaks the game completely. And there often isn't the time available to check first.
This isn't a foreign language problem. I'm using English on a UK keyboard.
But the 10% of lefties in the world that have never used WASD default, would find it impossible to play this game as it is now.
What truly breaks it, is that so much of the game requires precision and timing to meet the tight time deadlines. You cannot afford to miss one keypress sometimes, and that ruins the experience completely when you're never comfortable with the keyboard.
Right now I'm stuck on "return to Pearson" and cannot get back, for the life of me. Of course, I missed the first grab, since I couldn't find the "F" key quickly enough. Got the second grab, but returning now seems impossible, with a scripted event always out of range.
After 20 consecutive fails (and quite a few more on previous levels that were purely due to having the wrong key under my finger at the moment it mattered), I'm (frustration-quitting) giving up and abandoning it until you bring out a key remapping patch.
I didn't even stop to check whether this might be a problem. I can't recall the last time a game did not include a key binding change functionality.
Extremely disappointed. I'm even tempted to ask for a refund, since the general response is that DLC for the 90% matters more than making the game playable for the excluded 10%.
I note there is hope to use the AutoHotKey program mentioned in a previous post to force a remap from outside the game.
But I shouldn't have to do that.
Besides, I often alt-tab out of a paused game to check how other things are getting on (like emails), and that can't work if I'm using a global key mapper for all of windows.