I didn't expect to like this one as much as I did. While it unfortunately suffers from an inverted difficulty curve (where a lack of options and power at the beginning of the game makes the first few hours far more difficult than all that follow, even in repeat playthroughs), once it opens up, it feels empowering to find a new weapon or spell or accessory that suddenly makes some other set of tools viable.
It does feel like some of the systems of the game go underutilized. There's a whole system where liquids like oil, poison, or water can spill on the ground and react with fire or electricity, but aside from certain traps, this whole system doesn't come into play too often. It might be possible to work this to your own advantage if you set up your equipment right.
Altogether, a pleasant surprise. Worth pursuing if it looks like your thing, genre-wise.
A word of warning: a quest given fairly early can be easily failed in the very next room, and several other points throughout. Completing it is actually required in order to get the "good ending".

I can see a lot of value here, but too much of it is lost in annoying design decisions. At first, I was really enjoying how this game is perhaps the best attempt I've ever seen at capturing the tension of Dark Souls in 2D, but I was pretty permanently over this game's shit within just a couple of hours.

The game is very (very) pretty with some of my favorite lighting and particle effects I've seen in quite some time, I love how the game is loaded with loot and things to find in nearly every room (plus generous enemy drops) and I was even enjoying the slow, deliberate and very punishing combat, and the fact that you progress very slowly and enemies stay dead for as long as you stay alive, but the game had forced me to replay story sections or rewatch cutscenes upwards of ten times, including different cutscenes and sections, within like the first hour and that's when I knew I could never love this game. It's like the developers were actively attempting to place checkpoints right before cutscenes when they could just as well have been right after instead. I can't stress enough what a huge problem this was for me and that I'm not talking about one poorly placed checkpoint and one cutscene, but how it kept happening over and over in new situations.

I really don't understand why we're only allowed to activate checkpoints once even though the areas have us running in loops past the same checkpoint statue, since that only results in having to re-do any sections you didn't magically know the correct order for and I think I would've been able to like this game so much more if checkpoints just triggered when you walk past them like in every other game ever. What happens here, instead, is that you'll run past the checkpoint, since you have no choice due to it being in your way, in a T section room where the right path leads to a dead end and the bottom leads to the boss. You will now have to re-check the rooms to the right before heading down every single time, because the checkpoint was placed at the entrance to this T section room and not the exit leading to the boss. That type of thing happened literally constantly in the 2-3 hours I managed to play before I felt fed up with how this game handles progress and saving.

On top of all that time-wasting nonsense, it takes a lot for me to get into low pace and slow combat and I was just on the edge of almost loving this game when a tougher boss made me skip the same dialogue for like the seventh time and I just instantly lost all desire to continue. Very attractive and pretty cool game that someone who might love, but that someone isn't going to be me. It's a shame, because there is something unique and special here. I just wish the developers had been a little more aware of the player's time.