Good move with loot table, played through the zone, and it felt pointless to go around and look for chests, no equipment what so ever, just ore and shards
In the game meant to be the one where you can die a lot, cooking your healing items is a pain, no need to remove food completely, give us flask, that refill on visiting whispers or on death, and a way to increase the number of flasks, it can be the same as for inventory space. Gathering is good, but making it a requirement for the main loop, especially at the start of the game, when player has no money, it feels bad, I was going around with 20 mushrooms, just because there was no grass thing to combine, they all've been harvested
Food is a good option to get attack buffs or more max HP, but no for the main source of healing in souls-like game.
Slow weapons suck big time in fights with more that one enemy, it doesn’t feel like a dance, it looks like i’m a rolling stone, constantly rolling around until there is long enough window to do the attack.
Parring attack is pointless, gives just a small window to attack, no increased damage, no cool animations, enemy just stands there for 2 secs and goes back to normal. I was running with an one-handed axe, and it’s just no good, by the time i’m swinging it, the enemy almost back to normal and I have to roll back. Sound design could be improved, Sekiro’s parry sounds are good
Durability has no purpose, it just makes item unusable, look at the Monster Hunter World, your weapon loses sharpness, but it’s free to repair, gives an additional damage when it has full sharpness. But in this game it just does nothing, but creates a incentive for repair powder and a way to spend money. If you want to keep the durability, make it so the player want to have all equipment fixed up to get a little bonus to armor and damage, or something else. Do not introduce a punishing mechanic without it’s counterpart, otherwise it makes game sad.
On the Monster Hunter World note, take a look at their weapon’s attacks, they feel powerful, but balanced.
Dying and loosing all food you farmed and cooked hurt enough, but loosing durability on your armor in addition, makes death even worse
Attributes, or to be more precise, Attribute scaling, so you give a weapon additional damage with every 2 points? and increase damage by 1. Nice, but 4 hours in to the game and I still do 5 dmg to the boss? And leveling is slow. You want your game to be hard, but don’t make it into a mindless XP grinding.
So far game feels not rewarding at all, bosses drop nothing unique or powerful, defeating them doesn’t feel good, finding chests is worthless, going around the map only to look at hand made world is not enough to keep player interested in going in every corner.