A fun, creative, goofy and also very janky souls-like with a lot of charm to it. The fact that nearly every enemy and cause of death has it's own unique animation is both impressive and makes me want to die (positive) to every new enemy. I'm not sure if I'd call Dead Wells a hidden gem but it absolutely deserves more people giving it a try.
The weapons absolutely were one of the highlight with some of them being traditional fantasy options and others being complete nonsense, fantastic variety of choices. The combo system and movesets are rewarding to learn, though some weapon's inputs feel either bugged or far too difficult to pull off. You can absolutely stomp enemies once you get into the flow. The combat had a good fast paced flow to it, and while there isn't really builds, mixing passives, abilities and weapons was still fun to experiment with.
Exploration is rewarding as each chest you found just makes you overall stronger, you wont run into issues you would in say Dark Souls where you just constantly find things you can't use. Some of the levels are maze like dungeon crawls while others are wide open zones, others are a mix of both.
The enemy variety is quite low, however each enemy has a number of moves from dashes to grabs, ranged attacks to combos and area denial. The wide range of moves made the limited pool of foes feels less dull than it might in another game. The bosses were also quite fun both gameplay and design wise though felt often too weak to be a threat. Overall the game leans much more on the easy side of things, it was only on the last three levels that I felt really pressured.
As for the games jank and negatives. I mentioned above that some weapons combos and inputs can be either buggy or far too precise, it was bad enough that I actively avoided the few that had this issue. Audio balancing is absolutely all over the place, music is nearly silent some attacks are deafeningly loud. I never had any crashes and never fell through the map, but I did have one bug that required me to exit to the main menu. There's also some menu text overlap that can be visually obscuring for item descriptions.
Overall I had a pretty great time with Dead Wells, if you're at all interested in a more experimental, actiony King's Field/Souls game that leans into it's goofiness and can look past some jank I'd give this one a chance.
