"In from the Cold" Scenario, any way to skip it?

[Packetdancer]

Doing it AGAIN, I keyboard mashed as usual and somehow managed to bring up the settings menu, which you can't do in any other QTE in the game.

This was my one actual complaint about this section. Every other Active Time Maneuver locks out normal keyboard input during those times, so hitting "K" counts as "Press a button" as opposed to "Open character settings", and "C" counts as "Press a button" rather than "Open character window" and so on. This one locked out combat actions, but not keyboard input entirely. It startled me when I keyboard-mashed like usual and suddenly had like 4 windows open.

I escaped out hastily and finished the ATM without issue by sticking to just the movement keys, but it definitely could've made me fail that part.

I feel like that one's a bug; the control system probably has a few modes ("Standard combat", "Lock out combat actions", and "Lock out all input") and someone set the wrong flag there, compared to every other Active Time Maneuver. Hopefully that one gets a hotfix in 6.01 along with their adjustments to the difficulties.

Somehow at the end of this entire sequence that exists entirely to show how weak you are, you are magically strong enough to do all that stuff that happens at the end? It's in no way believable and feels like they wrote themselves into a corner then just ignored what they had already established to write themselves back out of it.

I am actually going to disagree here; that bit at the end was some of what made this sequence work for me. I took it as that all through the sequence up to that point, you're functionally limited to what this random Garlean grunt could reasonably have done. But at the end, pushed to your limit and desperate to get to your friends, you break through that and begin to draw on a bit of your normal power.

Which was, after all, the point of Fandaniel and Zenos' entire little mocking experiment: how formidable would you actually be, stripped of your strength? How much of your power could you feasibly draw on in an unfamiliar, weak body, if motivated by desperation? The answer seemed to be "more than I'd have expected at the beginning of this experience."

I still didn't find the sequence compelling enough that I have any desire to play it again, but it didn't fail narratively for me.

(Though it did feel odd they didn't do a little more with the thread from that sequence. I half-expected that at some point near the climax of the game, we'd be left in an unfamiliar body -- an aetheric construct to survive space or whatever -- and it would be the experience there that allowed us to still utilize any of our normal power in that form.)