Dvarka Deepwood doesn't feel alien enough.
It just looks like a weird earth forest. It gives an impression of a parallel world where everything is more or less the same, but slightly different. The animals are pretty much the same, but slightly different. Most of the flora looks like it's just slightly reimagined earth counterparts. It doesn't make me feel like I'm unimaginably far away from home in a desolate wast of deep space. It makes me feel like I moved in a parallel dimension.
Like, I have hard time finding something I really struggle to identify and which gives me a feeling that it's something truly alien, as if the evolution went completely different way.
There are average earth trees that just look different. There are some mushrooms. Plants that look like Nepēnthes (a carnivorous plant that lures in insects / small animals with a smell and then they fall inside and can't get out) but with teeth. Spiders that look like spiders but slightly different. A big boney bird that sometimes flies in the sky and that can be seen in lobby. A big venus flytrap that makes loud noises whenever I approach. And so on. I'm not a biology expert, I have pretty basic knowledge, but most of the plants and the few animals we've seen can be relatively easy identified with their IRL counterpart on Earth.
There are some cases that genuinely looked alien like those grey bowels-like plants/stones or whatever it was on some tiles, that actually looked completely alien and wrong (in a good way), but that's probably the only example I can come up with.
The rest is pretty much as I've said. It doesn't look alien to me. It's too similar to what we can find on Earth and it's kinda sad. I also hate how the sky looks. The view is crazy and beautiful, but I don't think that's how actual view of space is supposed to look like. In contrary to what I've said about lifeforms here, maybe BHVR should put realistic view of the sky over creative freedom here.
You can of course put on the nerd glasses and say the stuff like
"show me real alien life before critiquing" 🤓
or "dvarka is supposed to be similar to earth because humans couldn't live on a completely alien planet" 🤓
or other stuff that I genuinely tried not to phrase a strawman, but I don't think it's relevant. BHVR had full design control over how the map looks like, they said how it is supposed to convey that desolate feeling of loneliness far away from home and it fails to convey that feeling because it looks like BHVR put realism over creative freedom or just didn't bother too much.
I also dislike how the map is red. It's the second realm in a row where the colour scheme is so red, it makes hard to track scratchmarks. Why couldn't it be purple, for example? We've never had a purple map.
The only part about this map I genuinely enjoyed is the spaceship and I'm really sad we didn't get the full interior, but rather just a few rooms from it, one of which is filled with sporadic flesh growths (I guess the failed results of Singularity's work or just saved for later). That part of the map was actually done flawlessly. It really looks how devs said they intended it to be - human technology really looks weak, despite being extremely advanced, in comparison to whatever is around it. It gives off huge Alien movie vibes with the monitor and visuals designs. It would've been great if the map was actually the entire Toba spacecraft, while the Dvarka was just the background.