There’s a setting to make it less scary in the menus now!

You can disable (today, anyway) the internet search, and it gets wildly more useful after that. I wonder if it’s trying to be two things: searching your computer like it should, and for the less computer literate it’s “help me”

I use VoidTools Everything for searching. It’s absolutely lightning fast and super powerful.

The built in Windows search is such garbage

It started off a little slow, but imo it was better than the main game. It’s both a little more streamlined and better story-wise. You probably should play the main game first