The game is pretty much every bit of the classic it's made out to be. Aesthetically the game hits on all fronts and it plays well too. Only real issues is it's a tad too short and it tries to make up for it with the inverted castle gimmick and I couldn't be arsed to will my way through it. I also found that by the end of the game it's too easy to be overpowered if you bother to do any exploring and you can fart through most areas with relative ease. I killed the fake final boss in four attacks which is probably the point but also felt like the culmination of my experience with the last couple of areas of the game. None of this matters though because you get to hit giant ghost books with nunchaku.

The sense of progression is very satisfying until you hit Richter, where things are then ruined by needing to do a bunch of specific obscure shit to access the second half of the game. It got me back on board at that point by being pure combat 'till the end, which was great because I was really regretting not being able to explore what was clearly a deep and good-feeling combat system.

There's a lot of little annoyances and flaws which keep this from being truly great. The genre has moved far beyond SotN, and for good reason. That said, I can't deny the super fun gothic cheese here.