Most of these positive reviews were probably written during the first area, Quinta. I would recommend that game at that point, honestly. Decent showing. But once you get to the 2nd area, (sunny Greek isles), combat and build variety falls apart as the game forces you into parrying everything 10x or more just to survive.

Spells are useless and weak, and the enemies will stagger and stun you to no end unless you're using a fast weapon. There's no way to deal with ranged enemies so you just have to endure them until you can walk up to them (who thought this was fun?), and platforming is a mess. Boss fights in the 2nd area are also a lot clunkier (save for the main story boss). I recommend waiting until you reach that point in the game before you drop a review.

I'm at the 3rd region now which is not as bad as the 2nd region and I'm close to finishing the whole game. I can tell you that the game isn't as varied as most early game players think when it comes to combat especially when it just forces you to parry and stack up HP during mid to late game.

At $50 I honestly expected less jank and more voiced dialog or at the very least, the ability to change controls. Animations are awkward and feels like early access. Bugs are also aplenty, I even got soft-locked from starting the 3rd region because an elevator bugged out. I also can't seem to disable motion blur even if it's turned off in the settings. It's still there.

so far pretty good, please add controller button remapping, its almost 2025, we have the technology.

I would love to recommend this game.

First, the good:
The artstyle is terrific and I love the era and the inspirations. 15th/16th century Italy is not something we get to see pretty much ever in gaming, so seeing that brought to life in a dark soulslike is really cool!

The mask idea essentially creating different loadouts is very cool as well, and I like the fact that your mask changes everything about your character.

Boss design is also very strong, with interesting style and some very fun situations (I ended up beating up a giant winedrinking monster with a wine bottle sword).

Now, the bad:
Optimization. I was having constant lag issues on an RTX 4080, on high settings. Even medium still had these issues. This is frankly insane - I can understand having dips now and then during intensive sections, but this was just standing there! Now this is something that can be improved, and I hope it will be in the future.

Animations. These are janky, to say the least. Attack animations are serviceable overall, but are often interrupted by themselves or are otherwise weird - attacks will hit when it seems out of reach, or vice versa - and overall the game just feels clunky - forcing you to use faster weapons or else get locked into a stun fest.

Enemy consistency. Enemies will sometimes get staggered by attacks, sometimes not, with seemingly very little rhyme or reason for it. It's frustrating, because it means every fight is extra stressful - will this attack be interrupted by my attack, or not? It's a guessing game in the worst way.

Quality of Life. So this is a bit of a lump thing, but some other things I found bothersome:
The tutorial is...rather awful. It's a very short span of time that absolutely spams you with information and terms, most of which you have no idea what it means. It means you don't end up retaining much of that information, and it feels...frustrating!

The second boss is an awesome design - but he's so big his attacks become really hard to see! And knowing where to stand in order to actually get the stagger attack off is a bit of a guessing game. If they had done it like Lies of P, where it actually shows you, it would've been much better.

Customizable keybinds. I played on controller, which is fine! But not being able to customize keybinds on release is not acceptable. I'm glad they'll be adding this in soon, but it just makes me confused as to why this wasn't in from the get-go.

Overall, I think most issues can be resolved, especially optimization and quality of life. The big issues are the enemies feeling so inconsistent and plain not fun to fight. I'll probably give this game another look in a few months to see if things have improved! Thank you for reading.