This game frequently had me flip flopping between thinking "Oh this is neat" and "Oh this is dumb." I found that a lot of the areas have a really not fun gimmick to them that makes traversing to them a huge slog (stuff such as water that makes you move really slowly through it, lava streams that take like 3 full seconds to disappear, invincible ghosts you can't dodge through while you have to fight several enemies etc.) There's also a bunch of really weird design decisions that I just don't get, one of the biggest ones that comes to mind is that to unlock fast travel between your save points, you have to donate like 10k of your currency to a random alter that gives no indication that it will give you that.

For a metroidvania, I'm kinda baffled that the game never really gives you any powers through the main quest that allows you to backtrack and unlock new places like most metroidvanias do, but instead all of the abilities to unlock new areas are completely optional. And these abilities are so binary and uninteresting that don't do anything to affect how you play, but instead it's basically a switch you flick on and off only meant for discovering new areas and that's it.

Combat is simple, but simple isn't bad, it's just the fact that as absolutely gorgeous the artwork is for the game, and especially the bosses, I'm let down by the fact that all of the bosses in the base game are insanely easy and pretty much the most memorable things about them are their designs. The only exception when it comes to this is a snake boss that was added in a DLC that is an absolute nightmare of a slog to get to and one shots me.

Overall even though this review is all complaints, I did enjoy exploring this game, it's just that a lot of the times the reward for exploring is very underwhelming and aside from the visuals, this kinda soured me to the point where I'm just not interested in doing any of the DLC or NG+ stuff even though the NG+ features seems like a super cool thing I would love on any other game than this.