Pretty easy game if you are smart about things and don’t venture too far ahead of your current progression level. Early game is a bit of a slog but I’d say the grind becomes tolerable once you hit the swamps. Building bases can take a variable amount of hours depending on the scale, shacks to store materials and get a forge/workbench down takes no more than an hour, but a more sophisticated castle can take multiple hours.

In terms of total playtime, it’s toward the upper end, but I disagree with the other posters that it takes 100+ hours to beat the game. If you focus on progression and beating bosses you can beat the game in 60-80 hours. I beat it in 88 hours and I built a large castle in the mountains and a large farmhouse in the plains before finishing the game, which wasn’t necessary to kill the bosses. I would not consider leisure base building in the length of the game, so 100+ hr is a pretty extreme overestimate.