Yeah, basically. I played skyrim stealth and laughed at how retarded good it was. I play this stealth and it gets pretty high anxiety. On the harder difficulties, if you get discovered, you're toast. Replay value would be pretty high if it didn't make the game crazy easier knowing what to expect around each corner. Playing for high chaos on hardest difficulty right now. I die in 1-2 hits from anything, but with lethal options at my disposal and the knowledge of enemy placement from first play...it's not very challenging.
As a side note, I really like that they allow you to toggle basically all of the UI elements on/off in the options. Playing through the first playthrough just without objective markers makes exploration and paying attention to notes ridiculously important. It's a lot of fun.