I am a firm believer that if a game requires me to pull up a wiki to understand how to progress in the game, the game is extremely poorly designed. Factor that in as well as the fact that the gameplay is duller than a sheet of white paper and you get an experience that people will only remember fondly if they spent it in a voice call with friends, chatting about anything other than this unimaginative slog of a game. Playing this over something like Minecraft will never not make you look like a cringey contrarian.

I really wish I was able to give this game a better score, because what it's good at its REALLY good at, and it can be really fun! But when it's bad...

The only other soulslike I have played to completion is Elden Ring, though I've also dabbled with Bloodborne, Sekiro, and DS3. In each of these games, whenever you fail you feel as though it was your own lack of skill or knowledge that made you fail. This game commits the worst soulslike sin: making you feel as though your failures are the GAMES fault. The controls and camera can feel incredibly janky, some level designs make it nearly impossible to fight enemies without falling to your death, there are gamebreaking bugs that can either get you stuck in the environment, or worse stuck in an enemies grab attack, FORCING you to close and reopen the game.

There's also quite a lack of QoL in this game. Your map is stuck EXTREMELY zoomed in, so you are unable to pan to areas around you, and you are unable to mark points of interest on your map. Teleporting between shells requires you to first go to a different shell, which just causes needless backtracking. Acquiring skills can only be done at one NPC location you just need to teleport to with NOTHING else to do there, there is no reason for this, it should have been accessible in the menu.

Overall the game was cute and fun, but the fact that most of the challenge came from dealing with the developer's shortcomings rather than genuine difficulty definitely hindered what could've been a great experience.