From it's origins as a basic dungeon-crawler with as much variety as a salt shaker to a weird Zelda-style click-em-up, Bit Dungeon 3 sets its sights on the Souls games for inspiration this time around, and the result is certainly their most mechanically sound yet...and that's not saying much.

The vagueness of the narrative makes the progression feel directionless and confusing, but fortunately the overworld is so small that it's only a matter of time before you figure out what to do through simple exploration. Kill the bosses in the dungeons, and then kill the final boss. Then do it again, because as with all the Bit Dungeon games, the main appeal is in doing an ungodly amount of New Game Pluses, as there sure as shit isn't much satisfaction just from beating the final boss and being treated to an abrupt credits roll.

The enemies are vast in number in the overworld, attacking in groups of 5-10 and usually shadowed by a larger miniboss enemy, but once you're levelled a bit they shouldn't take much effort to kill. Hell, the overworld segments are more akin to musou-style games, just with campfires.

Random loot drops keep things fresh, unless you're maining a mage, as staffs for whatever reason are kept firmly out of the loot pool until 3 bosses in, making about 50% of all drops (weapons such as swords, axes, bows, etc.) useless. At least the rare armour sets look very cool, and lend themselves to a decent variety of builds - though perhaps I'm just this impressed because of how mediocre the last two games were.

This being said, magic is still completely broken, as the main form of projectile attack it would appear enemies have no visible counter. I tore through most of the bosses just by spamming projectiles and dumping most of my stat points into intelligence, ending fights absurdly quickly. I doubt the effectiveness of melee at all to be honest, as whenever I was engaged at close range I'd find my self stunlocked and losing almost half my health per combo from enemies with attack ranges far larger than their sprites would suggest.

What brings most of the experience down, though, are the bugs. So many bugs. Quest items would simply not spawn, I'd attack NPCs when I was simply trying to talk, important dialogue would skip, inputs wouldn't always register, the list goes on. This game has under gone a lot of patches since its launch 3 years ago, hell, this January alone saw a total rebalance. I tried this for the first time about a year ago, and it was a brutally impossible, broken and unfair disaster, and I'm glad it's been adjusted, but it's clear there's a broken base somewhere as the balance remains poor, as do the bugs.

I also question the permadeath. It's a franchise staple and a playthrough isn't too long, but having it so that dying a second time without getting your old soul back is permadeath is a little cruel in a soulslike...but even more so when invasions are a factor. I opted out, but I can't imagine the invasion element is any fun - especially given reports from players that a high-level player can just trounce a new player and wipe them out at the starting gate.

I concede that this is probably the best Bit Dungeon game so far, but I still can't really recommend it unless you really want a short, janky, new-game-plus-heavy, kinda-soulslike, kinda-musou hybrid that sounds worse and worse the more I try to add descriptors to it.
Oh, there's a horse? Sometimes? He's cool. Get it for the horse.