I'm not too far into the game but my first impressions are negative. For one, "context sensitive" exploration is incredibly rough, having your dodge button also be your sprint button which is also your climb button barely works when there's no exploration, but when there's a focus on poking your nose in the environment and a fixed camera, not having a specific button tied to jumping or sprinting or what have you is incredibly frustrating.

Then there's the combat, which feels like someone learned the wrong lessons from other stamina combat games. Lotsa enemy groups which attack in staggered patterns, and don't flinch from your attacks unless they are one of the weapon abilities (which require a resource), or via parry. This means dodging isn't nearly as useful as it is in other stamina games, since avoiding an attack doesn't open up your target as another enemy is now swinging at you as well. Parrying also doesn't feel gratifying as it doesn't really open up anything particularly good, since another enemy can just attack while you're performing it.

So what that leads you to is incredibly tedious crowd management where you circle the crowd, wait for all enemies in question to sorta get stuck on eachother or initiate an attack, which leaves you open to actually attack them, and then immediately retreat. Repeat this process until you have enough energy for a special weapon attack to do actual damage or until you slowly whittle down the enemy group.

Or the other option, which is just to cook a lot of healing items, and slam your face into combat and just facetank damage while you spam into enemies while they spam at you, but at that point then you're just playing an old ARPG wearing the skin of a new one.

Long and short of it: the combat lacks any satisfying impact, the exploration is unrewarding and frustrating due to contextual movement controls, and the game is... technically proficient in terms of art production but the character design is seemingly intentionally hideous which is... fine I guess? Just a strange choice that isn't my bag.

I'm not too far into the game but my first impressions are negative. For one, "context sensitive" exploration is incredibly rough, having your dodge button also be your sprint button which is also your climb button barely works when there's no exploration, but when there's a focus on poking your nose in the environment and a fixed camera, not having a specific button tied to jumping or sprinting or what have you is incredibly frustrating. Then there's the combat, which feels like someone learned the wrong lessons from other stamina combat games. Lotsa enemy groups which attack in staggered patterns, and don't flinch from your attacks unless they are one of the weapon abilities (which require a resource), or via parry. This means dodging isn't nearly as useful as it is in other stamina games, since avoiding an attack doesn't open up your target as another enemy is now swinging at you as well. Parrying also doesn't feel gratifying as it doesn't really open up anything particularly good, since another enemy can just attack while you're performing it. So what that leads you to is incredibly tedious crowd management where you circle the crowd, wait for all enemies in question to sorta get stuck on eachother or initiate an attack, which leaves you open to actually attack them, and then immediately retreat. Repeat this process until you have enough energy for a special weapon attack to do actual damage or until you slowly whittle down the enemy group. Or the other option, which is just to cook a lot of healing items, and slam your face into combat and just facetank damage while you spam into enemies while they spam at you, but at that point then you're just playing an old ARPG wearing the skin of a new one. Long and short of it: the combat lacks any satisfying impact, the exploration is unrewarding and frustrating due to contextual movement controls, and the game is... technically proficient in terms of art production but the character design is seemingly intentionally hideous which is... fine I guess? Just a strange choice that isn't my bag.