This game is so good at mechanically evoking monster horror. It absolutely nails the feeling of crawling through the air ducts, taking out humans one by one, and inspiring terror in the rest.

As a video game, it's lackluster. It bucks Metroidvania conventions in a number of ways that don't work out in its favor, ending up highly linear and not taking nearly enough advantage of what could be very interesting combat puzzles. But it does some really cool stuff and I'm glad I played it through to the end.

A fascinating and novel (if not always entirely graceful) mixture of narrative and mechanics. Hinting at a bunch of different narrative paths but only allowing the player to see a few each playthrough is a great recipe, and the use of different colors to encourage the player to specialize in particular locations is a clever twist.

The association of those colors with modes of communication isn't reinforced by anything else in the game, though, and the binary division of conversations into "success" or "failure" states limits the game mechanics' ability to speak to real human interaction. It's not clear to me that the card game portion of this is really pulling its weight at all, or if this would have been a stronger game with less mechanical overhead.

I feel it's important to note that a combination of two things finally got me to play my first real Souls: playing Sekiro and later growing to miss it dearly, and attempting to play a much worse Soulslike and getting so fed up I took solace in the real thing. For all their fearsome reputation, FromSoft games function like eductational tools: they take your hand and gently guide you from a novice to a player who can confidently defeat even the nastiest boss. They want you to succeed and they speak a consistent and thoughtful language to teach you how. If other games truly want to grab a piece of From's shining star, they don't need to learn a combat system or checkpoint-based level design, they need to learn how to teach.