If anything, the game isn't committing to its weird ideas enough? For all the complaining about things like how much anxiety stuff like the consumable checkpoint system i.e. vestige seeds cause (Which would actually be fucking awesome, for the love of god please bring back some tension when exploring levels in these sorts of games), the illusion falls away when temporary checkpoint spots are so frequent, and the one place you can always teleport back to is also the place that infinitely sells seeds for not very much. It used to be higher, but people complained enough that they halved the price. Thus, there's no real consequence to just placing a checkpoint down whenever you see one.
Complaints about how you need to use the lamp to pop the umbral parasites to knock The Hushed Saint off his horse in his boss fight are also pretty funny to me, because that's exactly the sort of thing I wanted to see; Have the umbral lamp be used in a way that adds a bit of a puzzle element on top of the standard Soulslike roll-and-slash-'em-up without replacing it. Sadly, the game doesn't really do this to the same extent after; The few times it tries to after just come off as token with how little of an advantage you get from using it, or unneeded with how easy the boss is. Alternatively, where are the other umbral parasites that add some sort of buff to normal enemies besides just invincibility + regeneration? One that adds poison? One that increases their damage? No? Just on a couple of bosses? Ok then.
The dual-world system in general is also weirdly underexplored. There are a few moments where you find a pretty lengthy path in the Umbral, you dive in there, and actually find yourself with the timer ticking down, or have to use the lamp in a way that allows you to avoid fully immersing yourself into the umbral, but most of the time, it's just another part of the main path that you have to go into; Certainly not helping that the whole "avoid having to go into the umbral" puzzles I mentioned are often undercut by it just giving you an escape point right after you cross it. This is where I think the movement restrictions (i.e. only being able to walk) while holding up the umbral lamp greatly hold the opportunities presented by this gameplay back. You could present far more scenarios to strategically use the lamp to partially immerse themselves if they could fall or sprint while holding up the lamp. There are a few more neat uses, like the one time where they use it to hide a level (Revelation Depths), and a few times where you have to fight a boss in it, but said bosses are literally just normal enemies with a health bar, and a pretty crappy NPC fight. At least the last one added some incentive to backtrack to various levels to find the required items to reach him, but where's stuff like having to go into the umbral to use a shortcut, thus raising the stakes for a bit? Or using the umbral to find an alternate entrance to the level? Or a level set entirely within the Umbral, with you having to scavenge around for checkpoint spots that aren't part of it to catch your breath and rest there?
Other than that, my complaints aren't anything you haven't heard of already if you've been paying any attention to the discourse around this game; Excessive use of ganks, mediocre enemy variety with a fair few reskins (Looking at you, Harrower Dervla! Don't think I didn't catch you splitting your moveset in half to create Crimson Rectors and Proselytes.), balancing, overreliance on tracking, skating on your attacks, overtuned enemy stats, nonexistent variety in movesets within weapon classes, bosses too easy, yada yada. Still though, I'm opting to give this a step above an above average rating. The art direction, the physicality of the world, and a lot of the enemy designs certainly help to get the game on my good side. But the overall experience was pretty electrifying, warts and all, if just for how willing it is to try to make exploring levels tense again. It's willing to throw you into stressful situations. And most importantly for me, it remembered that Soulslikes aren't just action games. It managed to ignite a sense of adventure in me in a way that other Soulslikes haven't.
And just to really be a shitter, there's something appealingly ironic about the way Dark Souls and Demon Souls got attention and praise for flouting what was "conventional wisdom" in games at the time, and now, a portion (Not entirety by any means! Don't misunderstand me) of flack towards this game was for the way it flouted conventional wisdom as established within Soulslikes. At the very least, this game bothered to strike out on a pretty interesting vision of some kind. If there ends up being a Lords of the Fallen 3, or a DLC of some kind, I'll definitely be on that rickety, experimental train ride.
Alternatively, this could all just be copium on my end, and I'll have an SMT V arc the way my man Fortayee did.
Complaints about how you need to use the lamp to pop the umbral parasites to knock The Hushed Saint off his horse in his boss fight are also pretty funny to me, because that's exactly the sort of thing I wanted to see; Have the umbral lamp be used in a way that adds a bit of a puzzle element on top of the standard Soulslike roll-and-slash-'em-up without replacing it. Sadly, the game doesn't really do this to the same extent after; The few times it tries to after just come off as token with how little of an advantage you get from using it, or unneeded with how easy the boss is. Alternatively, where are the other umbral parasites that add some sort of buff to normal enemies besides just invincibility + regeneration? One that adds poison? One that increases their damage? No? Just on a couple of bosses? Ok then.
The dual-world system in general is also weirdly underexplored. There are a few moments where you find a pretty lengthy path in the Umbral, you dive in there, and actually find yourself with the timer ticking down, or have to use the lamp in a way that allows you to avoid fully immersing yourself into the umbral, but most of the time, it's just another part of the main path that you have to go into; Certainly not helping that the whole "avoid having to go into the umbral" puzzles I mentioned are often undercut by it just giving you an escape point right after you cross it. This is where I think the movement restrictions (i.e. only being able to walk) while holding up the umbral lamp greatly hold the opportunities presented by this gameplay back. You could present far more scenarios to strategically use the lamp to partially immerse themselves if they could fall or sprint while holding up the lamp. There are a few more neat uses, like the one time where they use it to hide a level (Revelation Depths), and a few times where you have to fight a boss in it, but said bosses are literally just normal enemies with a health bar, and a pretty crappy NPC fight. At least the last one added some incentive to backtrack to various levels to find the required items to reach him, but where's stuff like having to go into the umbral to use a shortcut, thus raising the stakes for a bit? Or using the umbral to find an alternate entrance to the level? Or a level set entirely within the Umbral, with you having to scavenge around for checkpoint spots that aren't part of it to catch your breath and rest there?
Other than that, my complaints aren't anything you haven't heard of already if you've been paying any attention to the discourse around this game; Excessive use of ganks, mediocre enemy variety with a fair few reskins (Looking at you, Harrower Dervla! Don't think I didn't catch you splitting your moveset in half to create Crimson Rectors and Proselytes.), balancing, overreliance on tracking, skating on your attacks, overtuned enemy stats, nonexistent variety in movesets within weapon classes, bosses too easy, yada yada. Still though, I'm opting to give this a step above an above average rating. The art direction, the physicality of the world, and a lot of the enemy designs certainly help to get the game on my good side. But the overall experience was pretty electrifying, warts and all, if just for how willing it is to try to make exploring levels tense again. It's willing to throw you into stressful situations. And most importantly for me, it remembered that Soulslikes aren't just action games. It managed to ignite a sense of adventure in me in a way that other Soulslikes haven't.
And just to really be a shitter, there's something appealingly ironic about the way Dark Souls and Demon Souls got attention and praise for flouting what was "conventional wisdom" in games at the time, and now, a portion (Not entirety by any means! Don't misunderstand me) of flack towards this game was for the way it flouted conventional wisdom as established within Soulslikes. At the very least, this game bothered to strike out on a pretty interesting vision of some kind. If there ends up being a Lords of the Fallen 3, or a DLC of some kind, I'll definitely be on that rickety, experimental train ride.
Alternatively, this could all just be copium on my end, and I'll have an SMT V arc the way my man Fortayee did.