Temu Salt & Sanctuary, with none of that game's charm or polish. Uninteresting graphics and animations. It's basically a parrying simulator with little to nothing else, gameplay-wise. Parrying is mandatory from the first boss onward, and even many regular enemies will basically slaughter you if you don't parry them and counter. And the parry S U C K S. The timing is so jank, so inconsistent. It has to be hit considerably before the attack lands, and still feels incredibly inconsistent even once you adjust for this. The movement physics feel very stiff and floaty, like an old flash game, and the enemy attacks' hitboxes are so wack. Your attacks launch you forward a mile, which just feels terrible in games like this, and parries knock you backwards way too far (which will frequently launch you into pits if you do mid-air parries). From the moment you start the game, you see and feel the lack of polish.
There are a variety of weapons and 6 weapon types, but other than the staff (which fires projectiles), they feel very similar. I tried dex build and smaller weapons for most of the game, but realized they're just inferior to heavier weapons, so there's little to no point in using anything but the biggest axes you can find. In particular, many enemies are much easier to hit with aerial attacks rather than grounded, but your aerial attacks with lighter weapons will almost never oneshot the enemies, whereas with a heavy weapon you often can oneshot flying enemies (and they become very dangerous if there are multiple stunlocking you from both sides). So, you'd think lighter weapons might perhaps be better in the air or something, but no. And, this is really especially noticeable on the boss encounters.
Oh yeah and the final boss was a horrendous POS. Once you learn his patterns it's not so bad, but I'm not a fan of weird instant death nonsense attacks, especially when there's never been anything like that in the entire game up to that point.
Also, the game design is such that when you pass a certain boss, you lose access to the first area, and several characters, and therefore you will be locked out of a bunch of achievements if you didn't do everything you needed to do already. With knowledge of this beforehand, and save backups, it would be reasonable to 100% this game in like, 8-10h, or even less. Otherwise, you'll be stuck in 2+ playthroughs like I was.
There are some decent music tracks. And, I think the lore isn't bad, there's a little bit of story to uncover if you read everything, although the translation feels slightly dodgy at times. The game allows full respec (with limited consumables, but there are quite a few of them) which is a blessing in games like these. Way too many don't allow this, so points for that. Armor gives special abilities for full sets, but you always find full sets at the same time, so, it basically invalidates any mixing and matching you might want to do (which is extremely common in Dark Souls games to get the precise balance of armor/weight you're looking for). The firebrand system, which is basically a spell you equip that is cast when you parry, is a fine system.... but if you don't want to suffer, you'll just take the healing one at game start and never look back. By the time you're good enough at the game to not need the healing parry, there's no point in equipping any other because you simply no longer need any help.
It still had better QoL features than Salt & Sacrifice though...
