I am giving negative but actually I would give it a neutral. Sadly there are too many negative things to give it a positive one in my opinion. It seems that the game is dead when it comes to updates so I doubt that this game will have some polish that would fix various bugs etc.
Pros:
- Story, too bad that it ends that way.
- The beginning of the game gives some good vibes.
- Combat works but... (see cons)
- Quite interesting levelling system. 4 main paths where you can try to make some combinations. Makes me want to try different combinations. Too bad that there is no respec option to try other paths.
- Bosses were quite nice but... (see cons)
- Interesting possible equipment builds but... (see cons)
Cons:
- many bugs. I will list some. Npcs sometimes lose audio in their dialog or are very quiet. Clipping through objects, for example the last level had some jail location, by mistake I somehow clipped through bars and could not get out without going to a different location.
- Default control scheme. For a good half hour I did not know that there was a dodge button. I would never guess that the V button would have dodge action. Good thing that there is a remap option.
- Unclear statuses. There are various statuses in the game. You can see them next to your health bar. It would be nice to somehow get what they actually do (some kind of list in the character menu?).
- Battle feels clunky. Sometimes bosses one shot me with attacks when usually it only took some amount of my health. I was using a combination of shield and one-hand sword/axe. To be quite honest battle comes to doing dodge and then attack. You have two types of doges, long and short one. Short one you do when you only press dodge button, long one you also need to press direction. Short dodges have invincibility frames. After I figured it out, none of the bosses proved any serious difficulty for me (only those one hit kills).
- On death you lose some amount of ashes (souls/experience). I think that picking up your ashes would be better, those questionable deaths would be less painful then.
- Big problem with inventory, especially when games encourage you to grind for better equipment. First of all there is no sorting so items lists seem very unorganised. You cannot discard/sell items, only "exchange" them in a special place that you have access to after about 1/3 of the game. Inventory lists also have some visible count limit. When you pass that limit you will have very frequent messages to "go clean up your inventory" and only one way to do that is that special place. It is very annoying to get this message since after some time you have a quite nice list of good items that you do not want to exchange but you have to in order to get rid of this message.
- Random stat loot. You have to grind to get loot that you potentially want. For example, in some areas there are altars that you can give ashes and then you get equipment. I received armour that had +8 wisdom which seemed very good. but then I received the same armour with a bit better stat overall but only +2 wisdom. So after grinding a bit and getting this type of equipment it seems very not satisfying/rewarding. I think the upgrade system would be better here, for example when you have 5 swords you can upgrade it to sword +1 and select some boost that you would like to choose for the build that you would like to create, e.g. + 2 wisdom.
- Level design. Some places felt like they were generated by AI. It would be nice to have places that could actually feel like a real place. For example, the first level. I doubt that someone would actually make that sort of prison in real life.
- Completely useless lock pick mini game. Each of those is the same, I maybe failed it once so why do I need so many lock picks that can be found on the levels. I remember that I opened the locked chest and there was a lock pick, irony. I would remove it, it just does not work with souls like games.
- Artefacts. Not sure why those are in the game. When you pick them up you even get audio notification. I do not think that those can be used in any way, you can read its description for the lore.
I get it that it is a game probably made by one person but those small problems could be fixed in order to make the game better. I bought it on sale so I do not feel that bad about the purchase.
