Aaron O

At this point, in Early Access, this game is shaping up to be a flawed masterpiece. It has some problems, but even if they weren't fixed I'd still recommend the game for it unique brilliance. The good: The artstyle, the animations, the writing, and the combat are all second-to-none. It's a challenging but rewarding combat experience closer to Dark Souls than Diablo, but I think it is better than Souls' games. Every interaction seems believable and meaningful in a way that the school of game design gave up on a lot time ago. Weapons have heft and impact, attack animations have meaningful impact on gameplay, you get knocked down and roll out of the way of deadly coup de grace attacks, you manage your stamina and earn your hits. It works on every level. The bad: There are many situations where the fixed camera seems unresponsive to the circumstances. Especially because the game has a lot of exploration and traversal, often backtracking to places you've already been. For some reason, the camera cues during backtracking are apparently the same as going forward, so where the first time the camera lingers on the mouth of a cave where I am supposed to go, on the way back the camera lingers on the mouth of the cave I just came from, even if I'm under attack from elsewhere. There are also situations where there are paths and jumping puzzles off the bottom of the screen that are hard to spot or navigate. It's especially frustrating when you're traveling "down" and encounter an enemy. Occasionally this happens when traveling "left" or "right" as well, because the camera lazily follows behind my sprinting character, leaving her on the leading quarter of the screen charging blindly into an area I can't see, but is right in front of her.