Loving the game too! I've been telling people Dark Souls plus Links Awakening with some platforming in the too, but it's a hard game to describe.

I am pretty disappointed in the story. They feel like they kinda halfway committed to having an actual story, but completely forgot to make Mina an actual character. With how hard the game rubs the "twist" in your face, having a talking protagonist just ignore clear signs that something is wrong was... Annoying. I almost thought the game was hinting at me to go find/talk to Thorne but no.

This matches my thoughts as well, and I'm in the final dungeon of the game! Everything about the game is just brilliant. Dense is a good way of putting it, not only is the game as a whole really deep and full of secrets, the game is built to be INSANELY REPLAYABLE.

There's New Game+, and there are modifiers that drastically change how the game works, including "weird" modifiers like one that lets you jump super high and break the game. A lot of these modifiers make you access areas you shouldn't be able to early and that's intentional. There's also a built-in randomizer.

The achievements are also insanely deep if you are a psycho. There's an achievement for beating the game with 3 hard modifiers, one for beating with 3 weird modifiers, one for beating it without ever entering the underlab, one for beating at -1% completion (not sure what that means yet but I'm guessing beating the game without picking up anything), one for beating the game in under 4 hours... And so on...

Most people won't bother but it's wild how much they thought about longevity. I'm excited to start my 2nd playthrough after 100%ing my current one.

Matches my experience so far to a tee. Fantastic game.

It's concerning that "talk to NPCs and actually read the shit the game tells you" even needs to be said. How damn stupid are people getting that this isn't just normal operating behavior?

It makes me skeptical about the complaints about difficulty, too. It took me a few tries to get the hang of it but once I got comfortable with the controls, how burrowing works, etc it felt smooth and very well tuned. It's nice that they added custom difficulty options but I wonder if people aren't just too prone to giving up when challenged.

I didn't play the demo, so I was a bit surprised to find it has less in common with Link's Awakening and Castlevania than you might think

To me, the demo felt like it was setting up something resembling more of a Zelda game, even though the demo itself wasn't very Zelda due to its length. Which kinda made it worse to me, I thought I would get Legend of Mouse: Oracle of Slightly Souls and unexpectedly got Mouse Souls for the Gameboy Color.

That is a game I could ultimately find enjoyment in, but at 5-ish hours into the game, I was incredibly frustrated by the difference in expectations vs what I just played. The Zelda influence does show up a bit more later in the game as dungeon/world design improves a bit, but it remains thinner than I would've preferred. The "Souls mechanics" can mostly be turned off via the modifiers menu, but that doesn't really turn the game into what I would've preferred either.

For the right person, this is going to be a GotY candidate. I'm glad I did play it through to the end, but it's too soulsy for me to truly appreciate it. I will say that the soundtrack very well might be my soundtrack of the year though; easily Jake Kaufman's finest work (and the OST is pay-what-you-want on Bandcamp!).