Intro
i really like this game. i think this is the metroidvania with the most horizontal progression i've ever played, and i fucking love horizontal progression. there's a fuckton of equippable 'relics' and equipment that changes what your parry does, and a ton of different spells to swap out. additionally, there's a lot of abilities, with many routes you could possibly get through the game and tons of optional abilities. i got all 3 endings on normal difficulty, and i still don't have every single ability.

Bloat
now, while i think it is awesome to get new unique things your character can do for exploration as opposed to just a "damage up" or something else vertical/numerical, it can start to feel a little bit bloated at times. personally, i don't really have an issue with it, as i think it will make the game more replayable for me in the future, and if an item randomizer ever gets created for this, i'll be lining up at the door 8 hours in advance. yet, it's possible that some people might have a problem with the amount of things in this game.

Movement
the movement in this game is unique and fluid, and there's a large amount of emergent techniques gained from combining different movement mechanics. while there's often an 'intended' way to get through a platforming challenge, there's a lot of synergy with the abilities that let you free style your way through some of the obstacles after enough practice. there's even some mechanics that feel reminiscent of celeste speedrunning tech, which is quite fun, and i think would make speedrunning this game quite interesting from both a routing and movement perspective. some of the optional platforming sections are very difficult, and i have a lot of experience with difficult platformers, so i don't expect doing all of them is widely accomplishable by people that are not as versed in precise platforming as i am. an incredibly nice feature is the generous usage of 'red spikes' that will damage you back to your last stable ground location, but will not damage your HP, so you don't have to be stressed about finishing a movement based room in only a few tries. additionally, the game tutorializes a lot of these more complex movement mechanics in a way that is analogous to Celeste (2018) mod Community Collab gyms with in depth explanations, input sequences, and even in-game recordings in easily retriable obstacle courses that are organized by movement ability.

Combat
combat isn't the most insane, and the bosses are mostly just serviceable (no real standouts). however, as you progress, you get more and more movement options that also double as combat options and even expand the attacks that your spells can do, such as the difference between hitting a spore spell normally and spin-slashing it. as such, i was pretty satisfied with the combat and enjoyed stringing together random attacks and abilities against bosses, but it's nothing special. at least there's a parry which works fine enough.

Interface and Art
my biggest issue with the game is the interface and art. in the relic select screen, if you don't have enough points to spend on equipping a relic, its sprite will be greyed out, which is a pretty normal way to signify something isn't selectable. however, because the sprites for all of these SIXTY relics total aren't very distinct even with color, it is very difficult to look at them on the screen and know "oh that's [X] relic and that's [Y] relic." here is an imgur image showing this with color. it's not very distinct, and the similar variations even within the effects make it a little agonizing to use the interface and discern between your massive inventory. the map is large and expansive, but the map interface is lacking detail or landmarks. in Hollow Knight (2017), for example, if there's a significant statue in the world, or a small village or something, it's represented with a little drawing on the map. while Lone Fungus has shaped rooms on the map, there's none of this detail, so it's dreadful to match the map to your visual memory of the rooms. also, the achievements on steam visually look gross and muddied.

Conclusion
in short, i think this game is fantastic for movement and platforming, and i suspect has a large amount of variance in the order of completion with numerous sequence breaks possible. i am definitely going to go for all steam achievements eventually (which includes a permadeath 100% file completion), but i'll probably give it a little bit of a break before then. however, if you're looking for a good looking game with an interesting story and engaging combat, this probably isn't the one for you.

Really good metroidvania with a LOT to explore and do. The gameplay is really tight and the movement of the player is really well done. Combat is on the simple side but really explores the movement abilities granted, which differentiates it from the rest of the MVs.
The map is huge and progress is truly non-linear, with several abilities to discover (I hardly got them all to reach the true ending). Some additional notes: (i) 100% is brutal, as the platforming challenges are REALLY hard on this game; (ii) lack of direction sometimes gave me trouble to figure out where to go; (iii) Fast-travel is not the best but is serviceable.

Highly recommended.

I wanted to like this game a lot more than I did. But there were two main issues that got in the way for me.
1) Ability gating felt super arbitrary at times. There were objects that I'd look at and go "do I have the ability to do something with this?" and sometimes I would just not know. Same thing with some of the platforming sequences. Although fortunately some of them have an NPC who tells you if you have everything you need.
2) (and this is the main one) I can't quite tell if this is a me issue or what, but the bosses feel like they have a lot more health than they should. I get the impression that I was supposed to be using the spin jump a lot more (since you do more damage when spin jumping), but it puts you at such a significantly greater risk of getting hit that I kinda brushed off using it for boss fights (especially since some of the ones right after aren't great for that ability). It just feels very unreliable and hard to control in comparison to your normal slashes and I feel that it should have been left as a tool that more advanced players can use to make fights go faster rather than an expectation for any player hoping to finish the game.

Now, there's going to be a lot of complaining in this review, but that doesn't really reflect how much I liked the game. There's many things that could be improved, but none of these are major issues and the core gameplay is solid. Overall, this was quite a nice metroidvania.

First and foremost, the game suffers a bit from having slightly too many abilities and upgrades, and would probably have been a better game if a few had been removed and more time and polish were spent on each of the remaining ones.

Map is large and fairly good, though backtracking is a bit of a chore. There's a bit too many long and windy passages without any shortcuts, and the fast travel system wasn't good enough for most of the game.

Save points are also a little sparse and not discoverable enough. That is compensated somewhat by the lives-system, but it feels a bit out of place and like a band-aid solution. The sparseness is also a problem because by default, the map only updates when you visit a save point. Now, this behaviour is easy to change, but I wish the game had just committed to one and designed the map to suit that one.

The optional platforming challenges remind me of Celeste and I liked many of them, but also disliked many because of how fiddly the timings are.