Lunacid

If you're looking for a mostly calming atmospheric game with a touch of horror in certain areas, then you've found a good one here. The soundtrack is so good that I sometimes leave the game on while doing something else, especially in Wing's Rest. The Artstyle is also great and matches the atmosphere very well. I'm not an artist of any kind or a musician, atleast not anymore, so I apologize that I wasn't able to put exactly how I feel into words. Though, I'm confident you'll see what I mean if you decide to buy the game. To get into the gameplay, I do like how the class and stat systems allow for a decently diverse way of building your character. You can make a tanky Knight class that focuses on melee attacks and blocking to stay close to the action, tank hits, and hit back hard. You can go with a less tanky, but more agile shinobi that gets a lot of fast hits in, before then dodging and going back in. If melee isn't your style, you can build a pure range build with high speed and dexterity. My personal favorite is a Vampire that focuses on magic and melee, especially if you use one of the blood spells that increases your speed. With that being said, this system has its flaws as well. 1. Some spells are absolutely overpowered, especially one of the ice spells (Ifykyk) which I have used to melt the bosses. 2. Combine this spell with the previously mentioned blood spell, and you can very easily get in close, cast the op ice spell, and then run away with your increased speed. 3. The existence of this blood spell, alongside another spell, basically makes your regular speed and jump height almost irrelevant. In most of my builds, I beat the game with no more than 20-25 in speed and dexterity for this reason. 4. Due to this, I have personally found that specializing in Intelligence and strength, putting a decent amount into health and status resistance, and then the bare minimum speed and dexterity to get past certain platforming sections in the early areas makes the game too easy. 5. This is compounded by the fact that very few enemies pose a real threat until the very end game, and the AI is typically very easy to exploit. Though, I have beaten the game atleast 4 times by this point, so this might be coming from a biased perspective. Basically, once you know the game, you'll find that you can some very op weapons/spells before even fighting the first boss (there aren't many bosses to begin with though). Now, you might hear all of that and wonder why I still recommend the game. Well, to be honest, I actually like trying new builds in every run and optimizing them and seeing how early I can get some of the above mentioned weapons/spells. I'm not really a speedrunner, I don't have any times officially submitted to speedrun.com, but seeing how fast I can get to certain areas of the game purely by optimizing my build and getting the right stuff gets me going. Anyway, I won't go into the story, but it primarily revealed in a similar manner to the soulsborne games. I find certain parts of the worldbuilding to be interesting, but some of the story is kind of meh for me. With that being said, there are four endings, so the game has a bunch of replayability, especially considering two of the endings are rather hard to figure out and do without a guide. SPEAKING OF...the biggest gripe I think I might have for this game, are the secrets. You probably read the summary for this game and saw the name "Kingsfield". If you didn't know, that is another FromSoft game that was actually made before DarkSouls. In Kingsfield, there are secret doors...this game has a lot of those. Sometimes they're pretty obvious, other times not so much, and you'll likely find some early on...but I guarantee you will miss a lot of them on your first run. Which is fine...those secrets are less egregious. BUT, some of them are near impossible to find without a guide. If you insist on not using one to attempt a 100% of this game...well then, good luck is all I can give you. Because, not using a guide and just using the hints the game gives you and/or stumbling into things by pure bs luck is all you will have for that. Though, I have seen atleast one streamer happen upon relatively secret areas by pure circumstance, (aka, not paying attention) which ultimately lead them to attempting to do one specific ending, that he could not complete without first beating the game normally. This can and WILL lead to frustration if you like to do a lot of exploring and go down rabbit holes. As I'm writing this, I still have three achievements that I'm working on, I wasn't really achievement hunting for most of my hours, and I resigned myself to a guide. If you don't do any exploring and do minimal level grinding/build optimization, I'd say you could realistically beat this game in under 10 hours. Though, the exploration, (especially without a guide) can very fun even if some of the secrets are well hidden. Regardless of the issues I may have, I still very much recommend this game.