Just to throw some values into the room:
On my normal sata ssd it takes about 45 seconds from klicking play to menu (skip the intro).
On my “fast” nvme ssd it takes about 35 seconds
and on my “slow” hdd it takes about 4:30 min !!!
Yokes might be right it will be some unpacking or check sum calc.
What I can see on my hdd, windows tells me something about 20MB/s, so there must be some very IO intense operations, that is the point where hdd sucks and ssd rules.
Put Phoenix Point on your ssd, even any very old sata2 ssd with ~200-300Mbit max speed and less 50k IOPS will be way better than any hdd!
Maybe Snapshot Games can optimze something until release, but someone who still uses hdds today has to live with long loadtimes.