I unfortunately can't give a higher score for this game, even after so many patches the game still feels unfinished. There is a good blueprint and with a right execution it could've been an incredibly good game. But that unfortunately didn't happen in this timeline. The game seems to misunderstood what a hard but fair challenge is. It thinks that throwing 5 health-sponge enemies is a good design or in some cases way more. Enemy variety is probably the worst i've seen in any game. It doesn't matter if you have a fire dog, regular dog or ice dog or ice archers or poison archers, it's the same thing no matter what. Not to mention how the game loves to reuse some bosses into regular enemies the moment you beat that boss. Bosses were a huge letdown, as I mentioned many of them are just recycled as regular enemies later, the bosses that are not recycled are either a joke or boring. Exploration is also frustrating due to lack of visual clarity and because of many enemies. The game shot itself in the foot the moment they decided to have a separate world to explore which i feel like is the main reason for a horrible performance. The game is still buggy and you can get locked out of true ending for some things that were out of your control. Also who thought that the final boss should be a worse version of deacons of the deep. tl;dr the game bad

Aeterna noctis is a game that should be incredible just by looking at the artstyle, animations and so on. But the game is unfortunately tedious for the sake of being tedious. Combat feels weightless, the controls are infuriating (using analog stick to teleport around especially felt really akward), the world is big just for the sake of being big. There are qualities in this game. Some of the bosses are fun to learn, some areas are gorgeous and fun to explore. However there are more tedious and annoying areas than good ones. Also good luck figuring out where you are supposed to land when platforming because the foregrounds are filled with clusters that will make sure to distract you and annoy you.

I can see why people put this game as one of the best metroidvanias out there, but it just never clicked with me at all. Controls were very weird to control, especially when you are in water, enemies felt annoying to fight most of the time and biggest reason why this game didn't click with me was the save system. Why does the punishment for your death result in you loosing all of your progress and having to redo everything again. This was annoying especially if you've beaten a boss and then you die afterwards, so now you must fight the boss again because you didn't find the save station fast enough. As to why some metroidvanias even today have this system is still baffling to me.

After finishing this game, i still don't know how to feel about it. There are lot of things that i love in this game. First the artstyle and atmosphere are incredible, really loved the music (even if most of the bosses use the exact same soundtrack), and i really liked much more focus on challenging but fair platforming. When it comes to the exploration though this is where the game falls a little bit flat. Most of the time i found myself going through some difficult enemy encounters and very difficult platforming sections only for my reward to be some lore dumps, which isn't a bad thing by itself, but it felt really frustrating going out of my way to explore something only to find out that the reward is completely useless. Most of the enemies are really annoying to fight especially in one of the endgame areas. Bosses are a mix bag as well. Most of them are easy to defeat without thought. There are some bosses that are pretty difficult but their quality ranges from diffcult but fair to just absolute garbage to fight. I will say the final boss is probably the best (not the true final boss, he is kinda shit).
Overall while there are some flaws with this game, I think people should check it out for themselves.