The Shape of Magic

Hey! First time playing any Spiderweb games, and I've been plugging away at Geneforge 1 - Mutagen for a while now. I still can't get over the sense of freedom I have exploring. Here's a picture of my map progress so far. As you can probably see, I haven't even gone into Kazg yet because I've just been having too much fun exploring anything and everything. By now I've met (wait, I don't know what counts as a spoiler. I guess I'll put the name in a spoiler tag just to be safe?) the very significant character but I haven't decided whether to take his quest. I still need to meet before I really decide. It certainly feels like I've been skipping a lot of important story beats so far, but I'm just having too much fun wandering around and seeing what I can find! It's been pretty tough going at times though. I'm only playing on normal, and I've been taking basically every canister, but there are some areas like Western Wastes that are just killing me. I figure I'll just need to come back for those later. Oh, I also have no idea how to build my Shaper, haha. I don't know if this is at all what I should be doing with my stats, but I've been having a grand time. Please tell me that the other Spiderweb games are this engrossing!