I actually completely disagree with this!
I just finished the game tonight and loved it. I don’t know why there would be any frustration with the monster encounters; I never died once, although I did get hit a few times. The game is really, really good about telling you each monster’s capabilities without actually telling you, if you look and listen carefully. Which is what the game is all about.
I’ve never seen the “abandoned derelict station” environment done so well. All the little clicks and hisses were wonderful. This is a game that begs for headphones.
As for the dweeby protagonist, the VA in general was the thing I initially thought was most questionable and then halfway through came around to thinking was the best. These people are mostly nerds, and the last humans alive, banished to the bottom of the ocean. The script mostly avoids cliche and each of these people seems like a believable human, something I think is actually helped by the fact that the VAs are obviously not professionals. Simon and his main interlocutor never commit the plot-sin of just never telling each other what’s really going on, unless they have a motive to keep it hidden; they fill each other in on gaps in their knowledge quickly and efficiently so that they can be a better team. Though there is a kind of “audio log” mechanic (though contextualized better so that it’s not literally audio logs that people stand around recording and then dumping at convenient locations for no particular reason), the dialogues aren’t too on the nose with giving helpful puzzle-solving info to the player, nor are they all dramatically amped up to 11.
It’s a good game.