If you're like me, you were impressed by how stylistic this game is, and that holds true! This game is absolutely beautiful to look at. Every single moment of this game is like looking at an art piece. Playing is a different story.

You'll find quickly that there are very few ways to play that get you far. The easiest being to stick with normal swords that strike fast, have decent damage and range. Then, you poke enemies through floors until they die. The game becomes a lot of that as you get your sword really strong, rinse and repeat.

The reason I bring this up is that the combat is the roughest part of this game and it's the main focal point as well. It's intentionally sluggish to create difficulty, which is fine. But it's so intentionally sluggish that you find there's not many diverse options for you that allow you to actually kill any enemies. Slow swinging strong weapons are so slow you have to cancel your attacks to dodge most of the time. Plus, swords work just fine. You can kill with like 2-3 hits with a sword before the enemy gets an attack out anyway.

Progression is rough too. You are going to have to die quite a bit to then build up residual funds to stand a chance. That's not uncommon in games. But the clear jump between that feeling of "I need to die more" and "I'm prepared" is jarring. I think it'd be preferable to slowly feel like you're getting stronger.

After you fully beat the game once, there really isn't much in terms of replayability unless you are a completionist. You can make weapons stronger, you can unlock some new ones, but not too much more than that.

Overall I had fun with trying to learn the game but after 10 hours, I'm not dying at all to go back to it. I also would not recommend picking it up at full price. If this game is on sale for 50% off, watch a YouTube video of the combat and see if you like it