Five stars if you don't count the Black & White DLC, even if it's supposed to give a definitive ending to the game. I 100%ed all the maps other than the DLC one and beat Chuka in the DLC, couldn't figure out how to progress and peaced out on it with 80% map completion.

I think it's my kind of platforming and exploration-based Metroidvania and I appreciate the potential levels of nonlinearity in it that are tied specifically to your ability to understand your mechanics fully (some of these skill sets can be learned via found notes in some areas).

There were a few minor issues, such as the camera not going back to center when doing the down-dash ability and the lack of ability to have quest markers in case you're looking for someone or something in particular -- this is especially a pain in the case of finding all the robots (which I had already found before I got the quest started, so I just skipped that whole deal), as well as the Subway Depot quest and a generator quest for a particular region -- it asks you to turn on generators and you can 100% the map without finding all of the generators if you're like me and simply didn't look in a particular direction in one room.

I think my only other gripe was very minor and involved a particular ability you eventually get that is really fun, but can make some of your other abilities become a bit more finicky, without going into spoiler territory for some of the cool stuff you get.

Ended up dropping 24 hours on it for 100% map completion for everywhere other than the DLC and gathered all relevant items in the game but didn't finish a couple side quests. Absolutely worth it at full price and I'd say it's worth a look for any Metroidvania player -- if you see a sale, snatch it up!

Also, shout-outs to the dev for being cool in the Steam discussions when a Dutch person called his game "cringe" because in Dutch, "haak" means "hook" and you have a hook weapon, even though the dev speaks Cantonese and "haak" means "black" because your brother (the main quest point of the game has you seeking him out) is "baak", which means "white". The very polite correction followed by dead silence from the Dutch user was golden.

I bounced off this so hard.

Credit to them for nailing the Bloodborne aesthetic (for better or worse in some cases) -- it's clearly what they were aiming for, even down to that sound you'd hear when arriving in a new area in Bloodborne...which gets really old when you're fast traveling all the time in The Last Faith.

People mention the boss fights as being solid in this game and for me, they were just rather run-of-the-mill experiences, with maybe the exception of Edwyn (which felt like a fun dance) or the Yegor & Leena fight.

People also mention that generic enemies get pretty old and that group battles are a pain and I'm fully inclined to agree -- especially in regard to challenge rooms and a particular icy area of the game. Challenge rooms are supposed to make you deal with threats you've mostly disposed of by themselves in unwieldy groups...which could be fun tactically, but ends up just feeling more annoying than anything. That is, until they decide to add in enemies you've never encountered up to that point, who often will surprise you while you're disposing of the ones you're already familiar with. There's a very "gotcha!" feel to some challenge room fights because it feels like they wanted to take the idea of enemies besting you because you're not aware of your surroundings and then cram it into a 2D game that doesn't give you the ability to really look around quickly when you're dodging enemies (a little more on this later). What should be an "Oh, I should have paid attention to that!" moment often turns into a "How was I supposed to be remotely prepared for that?" moment instead and it gets old.

I mentioned a particular icy area because there are hazards throughout the game that love to deal contact damage to you and you've got that Castlevania knockback going on where you might as well go grab a coffee while you wait to get up, it feels that long. Some of these hazards will be set up to knock you into pits to create an instakill moment (yes, there are pits, but the map is usually good about identifying them, unlike with some specific cases with Blasphemous). Some of these hazards are set up to just bounce you directly into enemies and happen to be on a path of sheets of ice that make you slide everywhere, making the whole trip a cumbersome experience.

The biggest offender for combat, however, is the lack of invincibility frames. If an enemy hits you and you're starting to get knocked back and two other enemies decide to hit you at the same time, you eat all three hits immediately. You can be juggled by an enemy group if you're unlucky and it feels like you just got invited to a mid-tier Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 match, except your lifebar will generally dissipate in 3-4 hits, depending on whether you've been upgrading your Vitality stat at all. One note -- there is a boss that combo juggles you and does significantly less damage during these juggles if they catch you off guard, and I did kind of enjoy seeing it in this respect, as it felt like the potential for what you also should be capable of, but generally aren't. The fact is, most regular enemies die to just slash-spam if you're upgrading weapons at regular intervals, so they become nuisances that drop the usual Soulslike currency when they're not just being challenge room pains.

I think Bloodborne's system works really well for Bloodborne, but shoving the limited storage system into The Last Faith feels just excessive, especially when they decided to forego some of the solid design decisions for Bloodborne in the process. Aggressive combat to promote getting your health back? Not present. Abysmally slow healing that makes Dark Souls II healing look like a speedrun? Yeah, The Last Faith has that in spades. Gun parrying? Nah, just a singular ability that you can try and tick off that doesn't feel as intuitive as it should, but hey, we've got guns still!

Even the exploration feels frustrating because this is a game that absolutely wants to take the Bloodborne concept and shove it into a Metroidvania, so finding explorable places off the beaten path usually doesn't amount to much because you're often going to need an upgrade that you get from traversing the main path of gating bosses that grant you those abilities. I can't imagine how much worse Bloodborne would have felt if every new area you found had the equivalent of a roadblock that asked you to basically go back to the main story for several more hours if you wanted to come back and explore again.

Nearly every aspect of this game is frustrating to me -- even the story, which pretty much everyone mentions as being so very front and center while conveying almost nothing useful about why you're so corrupted, but we're definitely going to let you know that you're corrupted every single chance we get!

I don't see myself ever going back to finish this, and that's disappointing because I was really looking forward to it. It feels, at best, like a middling Metroidvania just wearing Bloodborne's clothing awkwardly and I can't abide by that because it's just not a good fit.

I 100%'d this game. Uhh...I guess that's supposed to mean I liked it?

-- Enemy AI for bosses ranges from bad to just plain screwed up (looking at you, optional bee boss)

-- Moreover, some tactics for boss fights require you to just do ridiculous but simple things in order to get an edge over said bosses. In the case of one boss, you have to repeatedly jump into and out of a death pit (you don't have to fall all the way down into it) because you can't jump over the boss or use your wall jump to get higher than it.

-- The music doesn't loop properly, so every time you enter a room, the music for that area starts over again. Hope you don't clear rooms too quickly!

-- I guess it's a Metroidvania because there is gating, but the gating feels questionable and is tied to new arrows you get that are actually pretty awful for using on regular enemies, so you pretty much just use your new arrows to make progress and stick with your generic arrows for damage.

-- Healing seems to be busted, at least if you want to play with the D-Pad on a controller because it will let you move left and right just fine, but if you press Up, you heal (whether you wanted to or not). This gets worse when you attempt to fire arrows while falling and sometimes the game just decides that what you MEANT to do was to heal right then. Also, if you die while you're healing, don't worry, you'll hear the heal prompt go off on the "FAIL" screen just to let you know that it understood what you wanted to do and just didn't feel like executing it while you were alive.

-- The dialogue is varying levels of terrible and also needed some serious translation work.

-- It really doesn't take much effort to get from the endgame requirements to 100%ing the game (like maybe an extra 30 minutes of gameplay), but I think it says something that about 20% of people that have played the game have beaten it, but only 5% actually bother to 100% it. I am one of those suckers that bothered to do it.

-- There's no final boss. Well, not really. There's A BOSS that's in the way of the last area before you go back to the beginning to finish the game, but it has about as much impact as any other boss in the game and the exact same music.

-- When you die, you're warped back to your last checkpoint you rested at and all progress you made is reverted. Yes, if you beat a boss and died before reaching a campfire, you get to fight the boss again. It's one of THOSE games.

Do I have anything good to say about this? Well, it only took me just over four hours to 100% it, so I guess it doesn't make you suffer for too long!

Seriously, it's not good. But if I 100%'d it, I feel obligated to detail my thoughts and I feel like I could probably write a lot more about the failings of this game, but I'll just say that if you're really in dire need of a Metroidvania, maybe you pick this up at 75% off and punish yourself accordingly. I got it for about six bucks (35% off) and I regret the purchase, but maybe your mileage may vary!