I genuinely think with real writing, dropping the whole sex doll aesthetic, and some balance tweaks to combat, this would've easily been on many GOTY frontrunner lists. A lot of the fundamental principles in polished combat animation and exploration are hitting harder here than many comparable games out there from first efforts into huge AAA bombast. However, the story is attrocious, the characters are all wet noodles, and the entire game feels like it was conceived by a basement of smelly straight cis male nerds who sexually harass women online every night before bed. (Given that this exact demographic went to bat starting a childish culture war because the devs made the protagonist's nearly exposed vulva slightly less nearly exposed, they really got exactly what they asked for with their choices.) Beyond that, the gameplay is all over the place, with player abilities that are hilariously overpowered alongside bosses that are beautifully designed but highly inconsistent in the readability of their animations.

My biggest gripe with gameplay was getting to the end having had most bosses go down in 1-2 attempts and then the final 2 bosses taking 10+. I recently spent hours learning to beat the final boss of Nine Sols, but I actually ended up dropping this game to easy mode after 30 minutes of the final boss (the one you fight if you side with Adam) just because I didn't really feel like it. (Ironically, that boss ended with giving me the last 30% of its health bar for free in a cool anime moment, so I didn't actually need to lower the difficulty.)

The biggest annoyance was that these last two bosses had more animations than any boss I can recall fighting in any game I've ever played, but soooo many of them read the same. Like, literally, a boss raises its arm in a pose to attack, and that pose could lead to fully 3-5 completely different combos, some of which have optional enders, and some of which are not meaningfully visually distinct from each other in any way despite having radically different timings and layers of fakeouts.

It's one thing to deal with crazy hard attacks, but the thing that really makes Fromsoft games and other fantastic action games work is by making all of those animations incredibly readable and learnable. Even Lies of P following the "haha fuck you" fakeout timing design of Elden Ring has a manageable number of animations to learn the silly timings for. In this case, it's just whether you have the reaction times necessary, because the average player will never memorize this many animations. However, the game up to that point hadn't required this skill much at all, with all the earlier bosses having very readable and learnable animations, so I would say overall good boss design with just a weird difficulty spike at the end. You can also tell the extremity of the final bosses is in response to how comically powerful the player is by the end, as the game literally winks at this when the second-to-last boss has the ability to instantly cancel some abilities that normally interrupt enemy boss animations with an instant counter where she throws you to the ground and kicks you in the stomach. (I could say a lot more about the boss animations and player toolkit, but I'm spending too much time lately writing game analysis for video essays and other things, maybe one day I'll fold it into an analysis of combat across similar games.)

Aside from that, my last gripe is the side content is pretty awful by the end. A few side quests were decent in at least leading to some more exploration and boss fights, but the vast majority are just literal chores. The exploration itself often felt great in the fundamentals, but the traversal mechanics were rough, with a lot of unnecessary hiccups in the animation and controls for jumping and climbing, especially some of the worst "attach to ropes/ledges" affordances I've seen in a game with this tier of visuals and animation. Lastly, far too many collectibles and a pointless and overdone fishing minigame. With some more restraint in side content, it could've been great on this axis, but you can tell these devs might not know what restraint was even if it was court ordered.

I genuinely think with real writing, dropping the whole sex doll aesthetic, and some balance tweaks to combat, this would've easily been on many GOTY frontrunner lists. A lot of the fundamental principles in polished combat animation and exploration are hitting harder here than many comparable games out there from first efforts into huge AAA bombast. However, the story is attrocious, the characters are all wet noodles, and the entire game feels like it was conceived by a basement of smelly straight cis male nerds who sexually harass women online every night before bed. (Given that this exact demographic went to bat starting a childish culture war because the devs made the protagonist's nearly exposed vulva slightly less nearly exposed, they really got exactly what they asked for with their choices.) Beyond that, the gameplay is all over the place, with player abilities that are hilariously overpowered alongside bosses that are beautifully designed but highly inconsistent in the readability of their animations.

My biggest gripe with gameplay was getting to the end having had most bosses go down in 1-2 attempts and then the final 2 bosses taking 10+. I recently spent hours learning to beat the final boss of Nine Sols, but I actually ended up dropping this game to easy mode after 30 minutes of the final boss (the one you fight if you side with Adam) just because I didn't really feel like it. (Ironically, that boss ended with giving me the last 30% of its health bar for free in a cool anime moment, so I didn't actually need to lower the difficulty.)

The biggest annoyance was that these last two bosses had more animations than any boss I can recall fighting in any game I've ever played, but soooo many of them read the same. Like, literally, a boss raises its arm in a pose to attack, and that pose could lead to fully 3-5 completely different combos, some of which have optional enders, and some of which are not meaningfully visually distinct from each other in any way despite having radically different timings and layers of fakeouts.

It's one thing to deal with crazy hard attacks, but the thing that really makes Fromsoft games and other fantastic action games work is by making all of those animations incredibly readable and learnable. Even Lies of P following the "haha fuck you" fakeout timing design of Elden Ring has a manageable number of animations to learn the silly timings for. In this case, it's just whether you have the reaction times necessary, because the average player will never memorize this many animations. However, the game up to that point hadn't required this skill much at all, with all the earlier bosses having very readable and learnable animations, so I would say overall good boss design with just a weird difficulty spike at the end. You can also tell the extremity of the final bosses is in response to how comically powerful the player is by the end, as the game literally winks at this when the second-to-last boss has the ability to instantly cancel some abilities that normally interrupt enemy boss animations with an instant counter where she throws you to the ground and kicks you in the stomach. (I could say a lot more about the boss animations and player toolkit, but I'm spending too much time lately writing game analysis for video essays and other things, maybe one day I'll fold it into an analysis of combat across similar games.)

Aside from that, my last gripe is the side content is pretty awful by the end. A few side quests were decent in at least leading to some more exploration and boss fights, but the vast majority are just literal chores. The exploration itself often felt great in the fundamentals, but the traversal mechanics were rough, with a lot of unnecessary hiccups in the animation and controls for jumping and climbing, especially some of the worst "attach to ropes/ledges" affordances I've seen in a game with this tier of visuals and animation. Lastly, far too many collectibles and a pointless and overdone fishing minigame. With some more restraint in side content, it could've been great on this axis, but you can tell these devs might not know what restraint was even if it was court ordered.