Was waiting for this to release for a while and was pleasantly surprised to see it was already released on Epic and farther along in development than expected. First off, the gunplay is great, like Destiny 2's gunplay but weightier, heavier, stronger, and meaner. The vibe is immaculate. The progression is satisfying. Pretty much the only things that I'd want is:
1. More stuff, which is planned.
2. Levels more like the castle that center on a location rather than just the wilderness.
3. More dynamic events like the Warden or the Drowned Captain.
4. There's plenty of weapons in the game and their progression is great, minor tuning to bring up some weaker options and further differentiate some of the semi-automatic rifles would be nice though.
5. Bosses look great but could do with more on the gameplay side of things. Would highly recommend looking at other non-standard fps games like RoboQuest for inspiration on how fast a boss fight should be, and how they should differentiate from regular enemies.
6. Extraction feels like a gimme - I never feel threatened to escape.
7. Looting feels separate from the world itself. I would recommend looking at another game, Chernobylite, to see how a single player story extraction game handles looting for inspiration on tying loot to the map itself instead of some chests.
8. Spooky ♥♥♥♥ and night time! The game is creepy during the day and some creepy night vibes would go hard!!
9. The souls/extraction intersection is really interesting, but I think some more thought needs to be done on where the difficulty should come from, particulary with respect to the enemies. Should some enemies (i.e. woodsman) just be a resource expense? What should a player do if they run out of ammo? How do you make an individual enemy a stronger threat without making them high damage and high health (Devotees can be frustrating here)? What enemies should be fodder, and what enemies should be individual threats? How can you identify individual threats over mobs of weaker foes? These are hard questions to answer, since this game is basically its own combination of genres! But I think fitting the design to answer these questions intently would do well to capitalize on this games potential. Recommending a couple more games, RoboQuest and ULTRAKILL have very intentionally enemy design that require the player to move to survive and punish the player for panicking -- I think this sort of high intensity control fits the FPS gameplay to a souls experience most, but I'd be eager to see what the developers make of this.

Was waiting for this to release for a while and was pleasantly surprised to see it was already released on Epic and farther along in development than expected. First off, the gunplay is great, like Destiny 2's gunplay but weightier, heavier, stronger, and meaner. The vibe is immaculate. The progression is satisfying. Pretty much the only things that I'd want is: 1. More stuff, which is planned. 2. Levels more like the castle that center on a location rather than just the wilderness. 3. More dynamic events like the Warden or the Drowned Captain. 4. There's plenty of weapons in the game and their progression is great, minor tuning to bring up some weaker options and further differentiate some of the semi-automatic rifles would be nice though. 5. Bosses look great but could do with more on the gameplay side of things. Would highly recommend looking at other non-standard fps games like RoboQuest for inspiration on how fast a boss fight should be, and how they should differentiate from regular enemies. 6. Extraction feels like a gimme - I never feel threatened to escape. 7. Looting feels separate from the world itself. I would recommend looking at another game, Chernobylite, to see how a single player story extraction game handles looting for inspiration on tying loot to the map itself instead of some chests. 8. Spooky shit and night time! The game is creepy during the day and some creepy night vibes would go hard!! 9. The souls/extraction intersection is really interesting, but I think some more thought needs to be done on where the difficulty should come from, particulary with respect to the enemies. Should some enemies (i.e. woodsman) just be a resource expense? What should a player do if they run out of ammo? How do you make an individual enemy a stronger threat without making them high damage and high health (Devotees can be frustrating here)? What enemies should be fodder, and what enemies should be individual threats? How can you identify individual threats over mobs of weaker foes? These are hard questions to answer, since this game is basically its own combination of genres! But I think fitting the design to answer these questions intently would do well to capitalize on this games potential. Recommending a couple more games, RoboQuest and ULTRAKILL have very intentionally enemy design that require the player to move to survive and punish the player for panicking -- I think this sort of high intensity control fits the FPS gameplay to a souls experience most, but I'd be eager to see what the developers make of this.