After around 4hours of play on Steam Deck, spent exploring heavily the early areas, reaching sacrament, then going back and defeating Darak and completing a bounty, here are some initial reactions and feedback:
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Overall gameplay early on is nice, difficulty is manageable but forces you to approach each encounter tactically. Good core game mechanics. Most importantly I had fun despite not being especially good at combat and dying a bunch on some enemies.
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The durability mechanics felt extremely punishing, especially when I realized my pants and chest armor - that I had already enchanted - disappeared without me seeing any warnings or indications that I was reaching low durability after a few encounters that felt really hard due to permanent staggers (2 fire bomb throwers and 1 axe wielder). Still not 100% sure if that is a bug or if equipment is supposed to disappear when breaking (my inventory was full at the time so maybe it got deleted instead of moving to my inventory). The details of the consequences of durability were not explained or I missed them, so I was slightly annoyed.
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While I understand fall damage should be punishing, I feel it could be improved, or give the player some leeway when approaching ledges or near mantling areas. There are multiple occasions where the character was rolling or jumping to their death or taking heavy damage instead of mantling on the nearby outcropping, in areas where I already did the exact same move multiple times, thus I knew if was possible.
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The forced control scheme meant that using consumable required staying in place for a bit on controller, but it felt pretty bad in some cramped areas where getting space from the enemies was impossible. It seemed to encourage using consumable before engaging - but the duration of said consumable was not really in line with the pace of combat. I don’t think I ever finished a combat with a consumable effect still active if I activated it before engaging. I would have liked a way to use consumable more easily or have longer duration so that I could rely on it for longer fights.
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While I do like that fast travel is not allowed without limits, I feel it should be possible within the ones you have “revealed” recently where the state of the world hasn’t changed (i.e. not re-spawned). As the world map is not always easy to read, I ended up taking a wrong turn a few times and having to backtrack running for a bit just to go back to a whisper I knew was free of enemies or any danger. Felt tedious more than anything.
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The inventory management while in vendors or crafting menus wasn’t great. I didn’t like the fact that you cannot see what you have equipped or compare in details (not just arrows for stats but detail on the enchants, the look of the armor and so on).
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I haven’t yet reached a point where it was completely unmanageable, but already inventory for resources and gear felt limited. I was collecting pretty much everything to sell for gear repairs, and as you find a bunch of identical items with stats that vary slightly, I felt compelled to check each duplicate and their value to drop the least valuable ones. Reinforced by the fact that coins in the wild are in very small stacks - basically insignificant compared to gear selling.
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Gear movesets felt different and impactful, however after finding the 5th azure sword with stats lower than the first one I found, it felt less interesting. Would have liked to find different types of swords with similar scaling, or at least different runes with them for more choice and variety. Loot didn’t really felt meaningful in my eyes, it was mostly same weapons and armors with very minor stat variations and crafting materials so I often ended up disappointed after opening a chest of defeating a tough encounter.
I would have liked more variety even early on.
All in all, there is a lot of potential and i am looking forward to picking up the game again.