I have been following this game since 2018, got obsessed with the idea in 2019 with its official announcement, since I hadn't yet put my hands on Bloodborne which seemed it share a lot aesthetically, and bought it not once but twice.

I bought the game on release on my phone in 2020, but then COVID happened and out of nowhere all my friends were home all the time so I ended up dropping it, turns out quite close to the end. Then, two years ago when it was announced for Steam, I bought it there too. At launch, many PC features were missing, but devs were promising to work on these issues in their community posts. That brings us to now, and I must say: the devs did patch the game and put effort into it, but there are still some issues.

The game is a mobile port to PC and has basic options for graphics, keybindings, audio, etc.
Sadly, some of these options are not working well and there are some issues in the port. I'll list some of the ones I noticed enough to take note of.
- V-sync, regardless of your screen's refresh rate locks FPS at 60.
- Anisotropic Filtering is not implemented at all but can be forced on a driver level.
- The camera sensitivity of your mouse scales with the FPS, so if you leave it completely unlocked, not even max sensitivity will be enough at high framerates.
- FOV options don't save when restarting the game.
- Audio mixing is a problem in the game, for example, when attacking two enemies the audio will get much louder, and some boss fights are just loud out of nowhere for no reason.
- UI can't update unless you restart, especially for keybinds.
That said, these were not deal breakers to me as I still kept playing the game, but I wish devs kept updating the game and made the PC port more polished!

My best suggestion to new buyers is to open the game and play through the first level understanding how much of Terrence's playstyle they like. Although the game has multiple characters, 4 including one from a DLC during the story, that can be used and have different playstyles, abilities, weapons, and skills, this game is about Terrence and Terrence alone. It will always come back to him, making some characters unavailable during specific story moments.

The game has a very strong sense of identity and it's graphically ambitious. The maps of the game, especially for running on mobile, are quite complex, big, and interconnected. The movement in general of the characters is quite clunky and slow, making movement in general not its highlight. Often during exploration, you'll find yourself opening all the pesky doors that could not be opened from that side by simply being meticulous with your exploration, although sometimes there might be just a tad bit too many of them.
Devs clearly took heavy inspiration from Dark Souls, down to some ugly map choices of Dark Souls 2 like small debris blocking you from accessing an area when you climb stairs that are double its size.

The story, while it's not the best I've ever seen, has a good delivery of it is well thought out and interesting. Still, there are a lot of new concepts and new characters thrown at you when exploring maps that have little depth besides a small side mission or no explanation. The subtitles never match what's being said 100%, often having very important info only in the not-so-good voice acting. The English translation in general leaves much to desire, but I could see the effort, especially in the many notes around the world.

Enemies AI is not the brightest and often just abuses hyper-armor to tank through your hits and get one or more of theirs in, in a game that does not feature animation queue cancellation and has no poise for most characters, except in specific moves. There's little to no way to escape during a combo, which you will always be in because enemies never got harder just spongier, with lots and lots of HP.

While exploring you'll find "Dark Mist" areas, which are just small bubbles with a chest and overpowered enemies you can ignore to only get the loot and leave, a bit sad as it could have been more, especially for what it's implied to be on a lore-level.

Throughout the whole game, there's the mechanic of "Sanity" that chips away the more you fight and can be restored with sanity potions, of which you can bring max 10, that can be crafted for the equivalent of "souls".
Bosses have a unique mechanic dependent on sanity, which when fully lost will make you a lunatic, and bosses will unlock a new moveset and recover to half of their health.

Out of all the DLCs that add costumes and more - thank god for the costume of Terrence - Tides of Oblivion is the only one I decided to get into because it was story-related. Other DLCs from what I saw are either enemy arenas or speedrun modes. The DLC was actually quite well done although a bit too long, Bosses were really fun and complex, making me enjoy the process of learning them regardless of their big health pool and damage output. One thing I was frustrated by, especially as it's never explained, is that around the DLC map, there are these "red swords sigils" you can interact with and it says you can't open them, yet, you just need to attack them. In a game that never ever had destroyable objects, it was quite a surprise and one I discovered in desperation when I had no idea how to reach the final DLC fight.

Lastly, I was a bit disappointed by the final boss of the game, as it's quite simple but clearly plays with a different set of rules from everything else in the game, starting from the fact it has three phases, resetting its health fully each time. The three phases are all very similar to each other but increasingly more frustrating.
The boss can summon enemies from the game without a cooldown unless you stun them until they go in hyper-armor and summon anyway. Enemies that while they only stay for one move/combo, start in said move, so out of nowhere there's a knight jump attacking you, a monster spewing poison, etc. At worst, I saw up to three different monsters on screen at the same time, with more to come right after.
The boss is also able to parry without the correct timing your attacks with little to no wind-up, can grab you without a way to escape as it spawns the grab under you, and can attack you while you're downed. This is just the first phase.
In the second phase, for no reason whatsoever, they can summon one of your allies to fight for them.
In the third phase, this is worsened with more attacks spawning directly on you. They can shoot perma-stunning bullets that unless you spam roll and pray you won't get hit, will be your demise if you don't start dodging them in advance. It has a move at the last third of health of the third health bar, that if you don't learn how to interrupt is a 100% death requiring you to restart from scratch only to attempt to learn how to interrupt it.
A very sour ending.

While I don't think this is the best souls-like out there, my time on it was enjoyable and I looked forward to playing it and finally seeing the full package I had been waiting for, for years. Although the game is enjoyable, I think 82 achievements and 5 playthroughs is a bit too much commitment considering the end product. From checking the wiki, and reading the Steam guides from "( ͡o ͜ʖ ͡o)" it doesn't even looks like I missed a lot.
Souls-likes are not scarce nowadays. Games like Blasphemous, Salt and Sanctuary, Lord of the Fallen (2014), Nioh, The Surge, etc. are much better and more polished experiences at the same if not lower price point. At 10€ on sale for this game, with half of that, you could get Lords of the Fallen 2014 and The Surge. At 6€ Blasphemous and at 10€ there's Nioh. I think the game is good, and I think you should get it if you really want to, but I think between the 7 From Software Souls games out there and plenty of better souls-likes, both 3D and 2D, we are spoiled with choice and this should be your last resort.

5/10

Finally started this up again to give it a second go. My initial experience with this was my wife and I laughing at how absurd the "lore dump" is at the beginning of the game, where they just throw out fantasy terms left and right and expect the player to just somehow remember all these terms for later like we've got a notebook on-hand or something. Coupled with the atrocious voice acting from Viola and Terrence's feathered companion, it was already off to a bad start.

Combat felt very basic, but otherwise fine. The real crime is the dodge mechanic -- backwards is fine, as it gives you good coverage overall. Forward, though...it's this awful hop that's miserable and does nothing for covering distance if you want to try and go past an enemy. You would actually be better served trying to dodge an enemy by turning away from them and then just rolling backwards twice. It's really that awful.

The bloom effect from sanity loss is annoying, especially since it becomes even more difficult to see over time with the tendrils of darkness that outline the bloom.

For some strange reason, even though the game gives you tutorial screens for stuff that you have to read through, it has "Hold (A) to Skip" at the bottom of the screen...but since the tutorial screens are just a screen popping up and nothing else, there's literally nothing to skip, which equates to a really silly design decision.

There hasn't been much music outside of cutscenes and it's all way louder than you'd expect for settings. Attacks don't feel like they have proper impact from their sounds (from you or against you).

Level design is actually pretty good, with some looping multi-leveled areas that allow for shortcutting while also making a smaller area feel larger than it really is. The Lunatic system for sanity is a nice touch for making bosses more difficult, but it leaves me wondering if you can just cheese bosses by getting enough sanity potions and bringing them with you to a boss fight. Without using a single one, I took the first boss down to half health before hitting zero sanity and activating Lunatic state.

Beyond that, there are some other notable things worth mentioning:

-- multiple characters (your mileage may vary on this, especially with the knowledge that your starting character is also the character you use for the final boss, which means upgrading other characters doesn't impact your final game state)

-- craftable relics-of-sorts that you can place on your character to gain stat increases

-- health and sanity potions are crafted (or sometimes found)

-- there's a skill system for each character that you can use certain items to acquire...skills can range from stat boosts (like sanity increases) to potion functionality (better potion results from your crafted items) to combat (backstabbing, different kinds of special attacks that use your Rage gauge), and so on.

Is it worth it? On sale, it might be worth a check if you're a fan of Souls games. I don't think it's as terrible looking as everyone seems to suggest, but that voice-acting really is A-W-F-U-L for some characters and forget about the dodge command.