Juego bastante divertido, pero no tiene nada de especial.
La dificultad es normalita para ser un souls.
Los diseños de personajes y enemigos no destacan mucho.
En cuanto al Gameplay, durante toda la partida solo usé dos magias de cuatro, la magia inicial es completamente inútil en cuanto desbloqueas la de hielo.
Pese a todo esto fue una experiencia divertida.

The rare game that clearly draws inspiration from Dark Souls but doesn't just try to replicate it, and is definitely the better for it.

Learning to use the different magic types to maximize effectiveness and take advantage of their various effects keeps things fresh.

Balancing melee, parrying and dodging in order to more quickly replenish mana stores, allowing for more frequent and more devastating magical attacks incentivizes taking bigger risks in a way that I found very enjoyable.

Nobeta herself and each boss character clearly had the most time spent on design wise. Basic enemies have far fewer distinguishing features, falling into a handful of distinct types. This does help to be able to more easily identify how to engage with enemies, which is nice, and most basic enemies have differently coloured variants, requiring shifts in tactics.

All around solid, and I'm looking forward to playing more of it.

"What if Dark Souls but nothing like Dark Souls?" is something that describes way too few obviously Souls-inspired games, but is honestly one of the best ways to do so in my opinion. In this case, the "nothing like Souls" part involves being a hybrid third-person shooter and platformer more than anything else, with just a bit of old-fashioned Japanese action game DNA thrown in for good measure.

The result works shockingly well and way more masterfully than I expect from this out-of-nowhere indie or AA developer I had never heard of before, with a wealth of unique mechanics and pretty fantastic player design. Moving your little witch around feels so good and so analog that I'm tempted to call it a form of shmoovement, especially when it comes to using midair melee attacks to extend jump range and save stamina (SO GOOD!). And as your ability to platform and enhance your ability to do so with midair jumps and dodges and speed-enhancing spells continues to grow, it feels better and better to the point where you feel like a master of the environment, leaping over bottomless abysses without any fear to speak of. It's something that feels lost in games that aren't called Lunistice or Pseudoregalia and yet here we are with a (much simpler) approximation of that in an UwU soulslike of all things.

This is to say nothing of the combat system itself, which is largely based on feedback loops. You see, killing enemies causes them to drop EXP ("souls"), but also health and magic drops too. And in a way that reminds me just a bit of what little I've played of Ninja Gaiden Black, you can use the magic drops to simply refill your magic meter by letting them touch you, or get a head start on casting another spell by hitting the cast button before that happens. This gives you a boost to filling your cast meter, meaning less time spent charging up. And if you know what you're doing, you can instantly refill OP charged up spells in a constant loop until everything in the room is obliterated. And that's without even getting into the other ways you can speed up cast time, such as with your melee attacks or with perfect dodge rolls (of course you have that)... or how your different elemental spells give you secondary buffs besides just using charged attacks.

The result of these two things is an adrenaline-fueled gameplay loop where you jump and run around arenas that often have a pretty sweet sense of verticality while picking off your foes in increasingly frantic manners and it kicks ass. THAT SAID...

...This is a very strange case of a game where they got the player design down, the unique mechanics down... so why weren't they able to properly incentivize a diverse use of the combat mechanics as they exist? Once in a while you get combat scenarios that are clearly designed with one specific spell in mind, but it's very rare that I found a scenario where mixing spells was incentivized in any meaningful way. There are no special effects besides "do damage" despite the elements, so there's not much any reason for the player to do anything except stick with the first order optimal strategy, unless they just want to mix things up for its own sake (please understand this isn't a "OOH there's no incentive to get better thing; this is a scenario where there's nothing to "get better" at in this regard).

And I think that's a damn shame, because playing this game feels GOOD. Executing the feedback loops feels GOOD. But how I wish there were more meaningful reasons to engage with different spells in a single fight, because that would make a world of difference to bring this very cool combat system together. It's the only thing keeping the game from 5 stars, personally.

As a fan of Souls-like, I am deeply curious in seeing a magic shooting element for this genre. For the most part it is basic, each element acting like a common weapon type (magnum, machine gun, shotgun, sniper rifle) with a special charged attack and buff. What I do love is how charged attacks can be sped up by dodging or attacking incentivizing an aggressive and skillful playstyle. Boss and enemy attacks are (mostly) well telegraphed making it enjoyable to do so and above all fair. The overall gameplay experience is nice, short and value for money.

Still, this does not meet my standards for recommendation because of several issue. First, it does not encourage element swapping due to the lack of system mechanics and combat difficulty. One element in particular has an overpowered charged buff that somewhat trivializes some of the fights and had no reason to switch because the others were inferior. If elements offered their own set of unique skills, passives, effects or alternate casts, it could be interesting to create combos. To be fair, the simple design may be intended given its budget, but I am disappointed.

Second is the story, pacing and characters. While I dislike item descriptions as a primary way to convey story, lore and world building, the notes here are not interesting to read nor fun to piece together. The real story is found on an external manga where it could have so much provided emotion, character and context which is such a shame. While I do sympathize with Nobeta, she is rather uninteresting without the supplementary materials. Upon finishing the game, I was not interested in anything which is sad.

The child aesthetics is a bit sketchy considering the special costumes and how the manga treats women despite the subject matter. I do want to see more children characters for the diversity and representation; however, this game really makes itself harder to recommend.

I do have some other gripes such as long boss walks, repeating cutscenes, slow dialogue transitions and so on. All in all, it is still a good game but not enough to recommend.

This game made me realize how could I love vastly different genres such as On-rail shooters and Hack and Slash and my indecision and nitpickiness about shooters in general:

I love the feeling of studying my enemies, feeling like I am in sync with them. It is going to sound weird, but I always felt like I was making some sort of tribute to the animation team: Being so in love with your animations, that I follow and trace them by heart like I'm dancing to them, or drawing on them. And this game, in a deceptively simple manner, nails that feeling like few others.

In the melee department, just dodges and parries with an ample window contribute to the fantasy of perfectly predicting your foes, liberating orbs in the process that you can either use to replenish your bars or absorb them into your special charge attacks ala Ninja Gaiden. Animations have the right amount of Wind-up and release, without becoming forcibly unpredictable like in some Souls games.

But where I did not expect the game to shine as much was in the shooting mechanics. Enemies all have a weakspot (usually, the head) that grants extra damage, multiplied if shot during a parry window. What was more surprising, was the deduction of damage if that weak spot is partially covered by a pierceable object (such as a hand or a shield). And this is no accessory, because enemies will intentionally twitch and obfuscate their weak spot during their wind-up and recovery animations so that it is difficult to aim at them.

Making animations that are BOTH satisfying to time in a melee context and satisfying to follow with the reticle of a gun like you would in an action-era Resident Evil is an incredibly commending job for an indie studio, specially when shooting at weak spots is a mechanic that people rarely nail nowadays, both visually and importance wise.

Which is, precisely, why it saddens me that the later weapons of the game get so absurdly broken that the game becomes a matter of spamming parries and big attacks rather than the methodical approach of its first three bosses. This results in a still very fun later half of the game, but one you feel overpowered going through. I would have loved to approach the final excellently designed bosses with the same tension I approached the first three.