I guess you were expecting a very different game. I would challenge calling that "poor execution" though. I personally found the difficulty, the danger of combat, and the atmosphere to be the game's biggest strengths. I was looking for a game that properly made you feel like a medieval peasant.

Too many medieval RPGs are about fulfilling a power fantasy as some kind of badass, but I really liked that KC:D was more about the vibes of just being a relative nobody in a historically accurate medieval simulation.