I did enjoy the game overall but I had quite a few flaws with it. First the good though, I thought the level design was consistently fun to explore and rewarding throughout. I also thought the combat up to a point was enjoyable but challenging. The art direction is gorgeous and the general presentation is great. However, this game really fell off in the final 3rd for me. I found the bosses not as interesting as the first 2/3rds of the game and I found it pretty overtuned in a lot of ways. I didn't much care for any of the VA work in the game, and the story just in general wasn't very interesting. The audio balance was also weird, the music was sometimes extremely overpowering to the rest of the sounds in the game. My last major issue is the rewards for exploration, while I find the level design itself to be rewarding and fun in how you explore it, the actual rewards you get are mostly cosmetic or currency for said cosmetics, and I found that to be really unsatisfying. I'm fine with some cosmetic rewards, but when it takes up more than half of the reason for exploration it bums me out a bit. There are luckily rewards such as increased health and items that open up other areas that do thankfully give you a bit more, but its not as frequent as I'd hope.

Overall, its a fun game thats enjoyable for a playthrough, and more challenging than i expected, but it has some things holding it back from being truly great to me.

Pretty good old school dungeon crawler. I really enjoyed the setting and the old school art style, a lot of the visuals looked like they were taken straight from morrowind and it looked great. Sound design was also solid, my biggest issue with the game comes from a lack of a map, honestly. My reaction to being lost in a game is initial wonder, then quickly frustration. A little bit of being lost is fine, but i found myself frustrated more often then I would have liked. A lot of ambiguous puzzle design that I'm not a huge fan of that makes it unlikely i'll do any of the extra side stuff or the other ending. Overall though, I did enjoy it, a pretty good dungeon crawler.

Its an alright game but I just find RoR2 better in pretty much every way, the 3D plane helps a lot with navigation and knowing how to get to the teleporter, not knowing where the teleporter is in this is so frustrating. Also the printers and scrapers in RoR2 were great, it let you mitigate some of the RNG and really get a strong build, but in this sometimes you just get the worst luck with nothing you can really do to mitigate it. The platforming is also just really bad, and a lot of the new challenges work around it, which I find quite frustrating. Grabbing a rope often doesn't happen if your firing and sometimes just doesn't happen at all, the magnetic pull of the ropes can really screw you.

Overall, I dont hate it and i'm sure i'll dabble in it with friends but I'd rather just play RoR2

Had a great time with it, really enjoyed the setting, characters and main story especially. The side content was pretty good as well, pretty fun sub stories as usual, I didn't really get gripped by any mini games like I usually do in these games though. Really though, the main story and characters was the best part of the game, and the combat was pretty enjoyable as well especially after a certain point. Probably my 2nd or 3rd favorite RGG game, around there with yakuza 0 and like a dragon, i'd need more time to think on it.

Man, this is a shame. Not because the game isn't good, but because it could have been even better than it turned out to be. Let me start with what I liked.

The art direction in the game is pretty fantastic, everything fits the setting, the trash from above littering the ocean combining with the organic environment is pretty masterfully done. The level design is pretty great as well, the levels feel well connected and with plenty to explore off the beaten path. The shell system and how it can also enhance your weapons was pretty cool, and definitely mixed up gameplay so things didn't get too same-y for the most part. The soundtrack isn't something i'd put in my playlist, but its definitely fitting for the game and it never put me off. The combat, while far from perfect(i'll get to that) is mostly good and I did enjoy the gameplay, bosses and enemies for the most part. Now to what I didn't enjoy

First of all, the map. Man, what the hell is this map? Its literally just a stagnant paper map that barely gives any information. You get some minor metroidvania like powers for backtracking and exploring, but the map really puts you off from doing so with how little it helps in the exploration. Next, the camera. Especially the lock on camera, which for some strange reason they decided to put giant black bars on the top and bottom when you locked on that really limit visibility. On top of that, its very easy for the camera to get slammed into the wall along with you when your pushed up against one, making combat during that kind of situation very annoying. Granted, dark souls has a similar camera but this game has more moments were your pushed against a wall in my experience. Next, the combat does have some occasional jankiness. On more than one occasion, after hooking an enemy or hitting a major attack after an enemys poise is broken, i would be sent into the air and either fall through the ground, or end up in a spot of the map i wasn't suppose to be. This also occasionally happened when an enemy attacked me up against a small object on the ground. Very frustrating and definitely ruined certain sections for me. I also found that the game overstayed its welcome for the final 25%. More than once, I found myself thinking "yeah this is the final boss" only for it to just not be and the game kept going, far after I completed the skill tree and had my build set, and it felt the game was crescendoing. It didn't help I found the story to be kind of not interesting? Its not that I didn't agree with a lot of the themes, but I've seen this kind of commentary done a million times especially in indie games at this point, and this game certainly doesn't do it better than the actual good ones. So for me the ending certainly dragged and I was ready to be done far before the end credits.

Another crabs treasure is far from a terrible game, but its also far from an exceptional one. Its certainly one of the better souls-likes not made by fromsoft, but its still riddled with issues that I find it hard to recommend outside of a decent discount.