Surprisingly good Souslike that might be the overall best one I've played, but suffers some serious problems. The game boasts a pretty and very cool art style quite unlike anything we've seen before and that stays strong throughout most of the game, perhaps one area excluded. It has combat that's similar enough to Souls to be comfortable and recognizable, but also distinct enough to feel like you're playing a retread, with the major difference being that there are more encounters with multiple enemies, tailored for this game's more co-op-focused design. The world is enjoyable with many things to find in every corner, leading to satisfying and fun exploration, especially once you find the ability that lets you throw spears to teleport to certain statues, which really changes how you view and investigate the environment around you.

The best part deserves its own paragraph; in this game, your goal is to establish a village and help out other survivors for some vague story reason I've forgotten. As you complete missions and recruit new citizens to your village, it will change and grow as you return to it to complete quests, and the most charming part is that you can see the characters working on the houses as they're being built. You start with just a campfire and finish with a full-blown little village of houses of various styles and sizes. You also begin with nothing and end with several different types of smiths and workbenches to do various things with. I love it and want to see things like this in every RPG!

When the game works as intended, which is most of the time in the overworld area of the game, it's addictive and enjoyable. When the game is at its best, it's probably even the best Soulslike out there. Traversing the normal world, with the exception of the third, ash-filled, area that is just a drag to both explore and look at it, is always enjoyable as the world is pretty and there is a reasonable amount of enemies placed in locations that are interesting to search. The combat isn't quite Dark Souls level, but it's good enough for what it is, and most enemies reach at least a base level of enjoyable to fight, with only a few exceptions. Basically, and in short, the first half of the game and up until you reach the infamous Matriarch is a joyous experiences.

However, the game has a few too many problems, mostly related to the focus on co-op and how bad the AI companions are. They are mostly fine and often quite helpful, which makes it even more frustrating when they decide to just despawn out of nowhere and for no reason, walk off a bridge and die while leaving you alone for the rest of that mission or just stand there and stare at a wall while you scream for them to stop it and come help you. It really doesn't help that the worst areas for AI survival are also the hardest dungeons, since they're unnecessarily filled with thin walkways and pitfalls that your programmed friend just can't handle, and this issue is made even worse by the sheer size and length of those dungeons. Dark Souls never makes you play stretches this long without a single bonfire in sight, forcing you to replay a solid 45 minutes to get back to where you were and regain your "souls", but this game does it in several places. Since the game is so heavily co-op focused with many fights that are unfair without help, the poor companion behavior brings the's game score down quite far. The most frustrating part is that this seems like developer pride, and that they really needed to accept that their companion code was a bit shit and that they should have offered more respawn stations for the AI in the tougher areas to make up for it just wandering off a bridge and ditching the player when they need the help the most.

As an aside, I personally didn't appreciate that this game is always online in co-op with an open lobby without ever telling you either that you're playing in an open lobby that people may join at any time, while also not mentioning that someone has joined you in any way whatsoever. I figured out that, wait a minute, I'm in an open co-op lobby and my "AI" friend is actually a human player when I saw the companion start to pick up loot and try to use the beckon feature to make me follow them. The game seems to employ some kind of automatic system where you join other people's games, and vice versa, without either player actually knowing that it's happening. That felt like, I don't know, some kind of mild invasion of privacy, that the game just puts you in an open lobby without ever telling you and then there's no info pop-up whatsoever that someone has joined you either. This is the only time I've had someone else show up in my game without so much as a "XxPussySmasher420xX has joined your party" or anything and it felt kind of uncomfortable and weird. I don't feel better about it since a human witnessed my perhaps most embarassing death, when I accidently pressed the jump button instead of loot on one of the aforementioned tiny ledges.

Let's not even talk about the absolute absurdity that is the ridiculous final boss. No, wait, she sucks so much that I have to dedicate a paragraph to her. She prevents me from ever getting the platinum trophy for this game since that requires you to play on hard and there are Dark Souls veterans around the internet who say that completing this boss solo and on hard is literally just impossible. I believe it and I'm never even going to start hard mode in this game. She was stupid-hard on normal and I've never struggled that much with a boss in any Soulsborne game. She isn't even a boss design since she's just good at literally everything and I don't think that qualifies as a design since a child can come up with this. Lightning fast and just steps out of your attack combo without ever being stunned, does absurd damage and can 2-hit you with a stunlock inbetween hits and has two absolutely massive health bars. She's made even worse by the fact that you have to replay her dungeon every time you want to try again, the companion happily dies often in said dungeon and each new attempt costs resources in spears, health and the damage resistance potion. She also demands a heavy weapon with a wide swing and I had chosen a heavy with precision attacks, which are just too slow for this speed demon on meth, so I had to spend a few hours upgrading a different axe just to be able to stand a chance. This boss sucks and is a really sour end to the game.

So, quite an enjoyable experience in most areas of the game, where the AI companion can behave and the game flows as its meant to, with a few too many misguided areas that could've been polished and where the developers just needed to swallow their pride and make some changes for the betterment of the game. Cool artstyle, solid enough combat that feels like Dark Souls Lite, enjoyable exploration with things to find in every corner and with some very sneaky and fun-to-find hiding spots, but the review score is brought down little by little, every time your idiot AI friend just attack combo's their way off a ledge and leaves you alone to take care of like a dozen enemies at the same time, and by the completely absurd final boss that comes out of nowhere. Was going to end the review by saying that I hope that the game made enough money for the studio to still be around, but they appear to be fine and have already shown off their next game, which actually looks cool even though it no longer has a unique art style. As much as I may have complained in this review, I will definitely be trying the team's next game to see if they've learned from Ashen and created an even better game. I hope they do!