Scratches a specific itch but sadly doesn't really grab me beyond that. The maps are gorgeous (at the expense of being a little hard to read, but thankfully there's a toggle to nametag every interactable), the combat pacing is great, I feel like I'm doing all the stuff I like doing in HoMM3, but for some reason it's just not grabbing me as much as I think it should. It might be the incredibly dull writing or the fact that the factions don't seem all that different mechanically. I'll keep poking at it though, I'd love it if the game fully clicked for me.

Fellow Silent Hill fans! Don't wait for Konami to do something, they'll only make a Frankenstein out of the dead franchise. As someone who is a huge fan of SH2, I'd highly recommend Funger games, but you have to keep a few things in mind, I'll explain them further.

While very conflicted initially, I'd say I liked it by the end, even more than the original game. But not in all aspects.
A word of advice: if you are new to this game/series, please, start with the easier difficulty. It's a much better experience with much better save system.
The normal difficulty though, is quite crazy and up until the very endgame I was struggling a lot. I was going in blind and it was really damn hard to understand how to recruit anyone other than Abella. In the end, my party consisted of Marina (me), Abella and Daan. And you receive some insane amounts of damage on normal difficulty too, so playing solo is practically out of question, even for Marcoh who can more or less deal with the first few encounters on his own.
And that leads us to my main complaint: the game has very poor, sadistic game design. Yes, I know it was basically intended for the player to suffer. But hear me out, hardcore players, please. Losing HOURS of progress isn't difficulty. It's an annoyance and a waste of time. If I have to replay 4 hours to try some new enemy/boss because oh wow the saves aren't random this time, but just LIMITED, it's a bad game design and you can't convince me otherwise. Real difficulty is in difficult situations and encounters a game presents to you while having an at least decent save system like in the Souls games where you lose your souls for new levels, but every other progress you made remains. And no, this game is NOT a roguelike. It has a semi-decent replayability, worse than the first one despite here being more characters because the map here is bigger and all the encounters are the same anyway.
But the story and some encounters, and also the feeling of learning more about the game and getting better are truly one of a kind. The final bosses of ending B made me run around, do some things and use some items at my disposal to defeat them and THAT is a good difficulty. That is an interesting encounter. Also, unlike the first game, this one has more interesting builds because of a bigger skill tree. That's commendable. Loved what I got with caster Marina with Osaa's skills.
Loved the development of ideas from the first game and how ending A is basically a thematic remake of the same ending from the first one.
Also happy to see Miro do better work on his characters, some of them are very good in this game. I just wish the encounters with them weren't so easily missable. The same issue was in Black Souls 2. Speaking of BS2, Pocketcat is literally Cheshire Cat, but better. Love the guy.

Miro, please, bring back Prelude to Darkness. It was such a good track. Not that the new ones are bad. In fact, this game has probably more cool tracks overall, but Prelude to Darkness was special. Would've loved to hear some remix or something.

Anyway, waiting for the next game (probably set in some distant future this time) and hoping the issues with the first and this one will finally be resolved and the game will finally be fun to play. At least I've seen some steps in the right direction. It's just that one of them (limited saves) turned into the wrong one. But if you play on the easier difficulty, you'll get the book that'll allow you to save on some ritual circles and those saves won't be limited to just 1, but 3!
That's why I recommended starting your first run with it to get to learn about the game and then replaying on the normal one for some remaining endings you wanna get, but couldn't.