Very cool game visually and atmospheric but:
- many descriptions are too abstract, i cannot tell which armor is better.
- annoying rare save points and too much backtrack and time spent after you die.
- collisions are sometimes broken, for a game that requires this much attention and syncronisation.. this is bad for controls.
I enjoyed the atmosphere, combat, and some of the boss fights, but the same can't be said of the navigation and level design.
The levels can be sprawling monstrosities without enough landmarks to go by, a fact only made worse in the moments when you can't even be sure if you're going the right way or if you're hopeless figuring out a puzzle that doesn't exist. Most games do a good job of communicating what are only branching paths with potential secrets and what are areas that won't be accessible until much later, always propelling you towards the next encounter without spoonfeeding.
This type of free exploration might be fun if the map were available to you from the start; unfortunately, the map for each level has to be unlocked from a specific point, which means that you either get lucky and find it by chance or do that grueling repeated exploration of every nook and cranny you've already seen until you figure out what was missed so you can get the map and then do a trial and error of every pathway till you determine the right one.
Even now, I don't think I could visualize these levels in my head beyond some vague pointers, and I still remember my way in games I played over a decade ago. Call it subjective, but I don't think that's a good sign.
Another thing I disliked were the restrictions imposed on platforming because the devs could not account to certain player moves in advance but didn't know how to restrict said actions in the rules they established. Jumps that should be survivable given the damage you sustain aren't for the simple reason that it would ruin the intended progression, so you get teleported back. But this intended progression should be a natural by-product of the overall design without punishing the player for figuring out their way around an obstacle.
As much as I like other aspects of the game, the poor level design just drags down the whole thing. But it's their first release so I think it's understandable, if regretful.
All in all a good game. But there's one particular part that had me cursing the developers. The Palace. With its multistep moving platform puzzles. Which are not optional. It felt harder than The Path of Pain in Hollow Knight and as irritating as the worm sequence in Ori 2.
Beutiful metroidvania with a bunch of souls-like mechanics, like stamina-management and levelling and upgrading.
The gameplay is done quite competently, the movements are fluid, the enemies are plenty and to various degree challenging, the platforming is MOSTLY fairly designed (with the exception of 1 horrible optional section in Garden location). One issue here is the backtracking. You only gain ability to fast travel between every checkpoint after final boss. Before that there are few points for fast travel scattered pretty far from points of interest you'd need to return after gaining some new skills. The better fast travel either shouldn't exist, or should be unlockable sooner, IMO.
Music is too melancholic for me to listen outside the game, but does exceptional job for game's atmosphere.
And the real start of the show: the visuals. Damn this game looks great! The art direction, the graphics quality and the animations are all superb and contribute to one of the best looking 3d side-scrollers I had the pleasure of playing. Unfortunately, while most of the game runs with no issues, the visual clutter in boss fights did result in significant fps drops for me, and that messed up my attempts a few times.
OVerall, totally worth the money.