Without presets or extra prompt beyond a reminder to stay in 3rd person and not talk for me.
I like it a lot. It sticks to the characters and it's pretty lively. I like the pacing, and that it's believable.
However:
Somehow, it simultaneously has: -) some extremely arbitrary choice of words , it feels like you dialed up temperature almost to the point of hallucinating, sometimes it uses words wrong or takes the wrong direction with them, and: -) is repetitive. I've had models that were worse, sure, or tedious - but this one, it sometimes reuses a little paragraph verbatim. Somehow it makes it work nonetheless. And it also does some really good recalls of messages way earlier - but the reuse of phrases? It still feels weird somehow.
I'm probably going to use it as long as it's free. And if it gets released? I think I'm going to keep using it if it's at Gemma/Deepseek level of price, maybe rotational with them.