Yeah on my first go around I actively AVOIDED rest as much as possible given that... tadpole in your head. You probably don't want to waste days. I was kind of scared that you will actually have to resource manage the days you have, which is both great thematically and a good way to naturally limit the amounts long rests you use. I play RPGs to be as fully immersed as I could be, but my second playthrough was more testing the limits of the game and seeing what happens if you rest a lot. I never saw that object of desire girl, I thought it was a thing not implemented yet. But thats partly cause I didn't use the tadpole even once.
That was until I realized the game not only doesn't care but encourages you to spam long rests. In my long rest abuse playthrough the game was super easy and I saw all the cutscenes and character interactions before I even explored half the map. As opposed to my first playthrough where I saw like... 1 scene tops with each companion. I got Raphael cutscene when I hit underdark.
So to me it feels like they want to encourage you to not only use, but spam long rests. It's not really balanced at all so far. It's just a full heal button. If you cant use it where you are just fast travel. You can do it from basically everywhere. Things don't respawn (thank god) so its not like you'll encounter more resistance by trekking back. You can rather easily play on the hardest difficulty and do this to essentially lower it to nothing. Things just take longer rather than being harder.
