I think this game has some good bones though it needs some heavy tuning. The game feels punishing for the sake of being punishing.
Fall damage is extreme, you jumped down from one floor to another and loose half your health. The camera is locked so there are a lot of obstructions in your view when trying to platform the level and an equal amount of off camera holes to fall to your death through. This ends up in getting a lot of cheesed deaths or fall damage which racks up a lot of durability loss. It would also help if you broke up sprint, jump and dodge from all being on the same button too. There have been many times when I’m trying to jump but end up dashing off to my death instead.
Durability seems way over tuned, between falling to my death and mobs that chunk you for a quarter of your health, it really broke my only weapon (staff) I could find quick, so I was stuck with fighting unarmed. Item drops seem bugged, I have 6 pairs of pants but nothing else when it comes to armor or weapons. The game could really use keeping your starting sword and shield from the ship, or giving some more starter option when you hit the beach.
Uncooked food heals you for like 10% of your health and getting cooked food seems like a chore already. The button to eat the food seems bugged too, feels very unresponsive to even get your character to heal. If you are going to lean so far into the from soft approach it would be nice if you could heal by visiting the bonfires. Also not having rechargeable flasks instead of food feels bad with how little you get healed from raw food early on. I harvested a lot of food resources though was only able to make mushroom soup because that was the only cooking recipe i had unlocked. You should really let us cook any of the fish or other food you can harvest without a recipe and save recipes for better or specialty buff food.
Combat feels clunky, every enemy seems to have way to much pose so you can’t combo very easy without trading damage. Stamina feels very stingy as well. So every fight has devolved into me heavy attacking in and then dodging back to recoup stamina and not take damage, which is pretty boring. I’m guessing this would get better when I unlock some more weapons and put some points in stamina. It would also be nice if the default run was faster, right now if your not sprinting and burning stamina you are stuck rp walking.
TLDR
So all in all I’m excited to see this game get refined though I’m going to give it some patches before giving it another go. Would love to see pose on mobs reduced (or starter items that can actually stagger mobs available after the boat), fall damage threshold increased before taking damage, durability reevaluate, breaking up jump and dash and to be able to rotate the camera around your character. All things that can easily be tweaked.