i liked going back to this game having played every other fromsoft souls type beat. each modern fromsoft game has systems and areas that are built from lessons learned in previous titles, but it's accessing the matrix code seeing how much of what they do is this weird endless spiral of repeated game design. you'll come across the tower knight in bloodborne or the capra demon in elden ring almost entirely unchanged from their original incarnations outside of the reskins and it never feels like it's ""recycled content"" in any way. riffs on bosses and levels and very specific ideas that they think are cool and want to do again with a slightly different flavor and very little tweaking because, somehow, they usually got it right the first time anyways. boletaria palace a place so nice they did it thrice for dark souls 3 and elden ring.
this one is the cleanest of all the ""SoulsLikes"" excluding bloodborne. the humanity system is simple and unobtrusive and letting you level from any bonfire rather then a nexus (or a majula or a dream or another firelink shrine) works perfectly for the kind of compact level design they were going for. intensely satisfying to move through even though it had no real secrets or surprises for me thanks to the endless and inescapable lore and pvp videos that were sprayed at me like a firehose back in the 360 days.