Exploration
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The newbie guide UI is not user-friendly. For example, it tells players to go sleep in the lower deck of the cabin, but the hint disappears once the player goes down. To find it again, they need to climb back up to see it.
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Some items are highlighted while others are not, making it easy to miss items.
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Interaction with the events/items/NPCs requires getting very close and perfectly aligning in the direction to trigger actions.
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Character’s walking movement speed is too slow.
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The camera cannot be freely rotated, making exploration of some scenes awkward. Some enemy ambushes come from off-screen, which feels very unfair.
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Falling damage is too high; even falling from not-so-high ladders causes a high damage. Running triggers a fall jump that compounds the issue with the locked camera, leading to severe negative feedback during exploration of some scenes.
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Tips that appear on the right disappear before they can be fully read or disappear accidentally when touched.
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Important interactable events/items are not highlighted, making it hard to find in dark areas.
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The main route is unclear; main roads and side paths are mixed together, making it easy to lose sense of direction, necessitating frequent opening of the map.
Combat
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Executions offer low risk and high reward against bosses, but high risk and low reward against smaller enemies.
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Starting stamina is very low, much lower than other soul-like games.
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Not enough differentiation in the stance bar of small enemies; even agile enemies wielding dual blades are hard to interrupt.
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Contrary to intuition, burning status cannot be negated by rolling.
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Unlike the player, many enemies seem to have infinite stamina, creating an excessive sense of unfairness. The flame pot thrower, who continuously throws explosive bombs, and when player exhausts stamina to approaches, the enemy triggers a high-damage double strike with a very short wind-up.
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Charged attacks require taking on significantly higher risk but do not offer matching rewards in action, damage, or function.
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The aforementioned performance gap between player and the enemies forces player to play very passively when facing multiple enemies; it is frustrated that our attacks cannot interrupt some small enemies when we are outnumbered and our stamina is limited.
Resources
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Personally, I believe the equipment durability system in a soul-like game is a regression in game history.
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Repairs must be done by visiting a blacksmith, but the teleportation is very inconvenient, disrupting the immersive exploration and combat. Whether as a soul-like or a Diablo-like game, the current teleportation feature is not enough.
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No resources are provided after each resurrection, and the acquisition of recovery materials is unstable, easily leading to a negative feedback loop of having no recovery available, and the process of searching for materials disrupts the immersion of exploration again.
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The terrible backpack capacity like Dragon’s Dogma 2 meets the backpack needs of a Diablo-like game. Sharing one backpack for equipment and weapons is still an okay, but it’s unreasonable that materials for construction and resources for cooking also share one backpack.
Other
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In keyboard controls, the “Exit Game” option is not intuitive; it is not on the main menu page.
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After the main city animation ends and the character wakes up from the bed, moving will cause the character to drift lying on the ground.