This is a tough one to write about.
Short answer: It's probably a really good game at its core and if you like puzzle-centric Metroidvanias that encourage exploring, this is probably your cup of tea.
Longer answer: For me at least, it's too puzzle-centric. There's an amazing amount of exploration to be done with secrets hidden in practically every room you enter (and if they're not hidden, it's because you stumbled into a secret room and the chests are there, waiting for you if you can solve a puzzle to reach them).
Fast travel is a little unintuitive at times because some campfires you travel from don't reach areas you think they would when heading back from them. That being said, the caves you explore are labyrinthine in nature and it kinda fits the mold of the game, so it's hard to gripe about that.
The soundtrack is solid. Not much else to say about that because it's an enjoyable listen, but nothing I'm adding to my music collection.
Enemy diversity is a mixed bag, in that there are some interesting enemy choices that have distinct behaviors, but some enemies really are just basic palette swaps with nothing else going for them beyond dealing more damage/taking more damage before dying.
Bosses are a great time, though for all the traveling I did in the game, they feel few and far between. That may just be a perception issue on my part because of getting lost a few times and having to backtrack a bit to figure out where to go next, but I figure it's worth noting.
Bosses (outside of maybe the first) require patience and paying attention to the layout of the room and whatever resources might be there to maximize your chances for survival. Although a barbarian's instinct might be to Hulk-Smash! your way through them, the player better bring a heaping of awareness to the match because you don't get any kinds of items to heal or boost stats or anything of the sort when going into these fights -- it's adapting to the situation or getting wrecked.
I think I enjoyed every boss fight I encountered outside of maybe the boss of the Eternal Palace area, which just felt like a chore to deal with, despite probably being the easiest boss to figure out.
I should give a brief mention to combat in general -- it's extremely basic and consists of you slashy-slashing and occasionally using your bat to manipulate resources around you to deal with enemies. Sometimes you might throw a stone to hit an enemy and elicit a particular behavior from them (be it knocking them off a ceiling or a ledge), but it's mostly just about slashing (or charge-slashing) while not being in the way of whatever the enemy might have in store for you.
I want to mention the map system because I said earlier that the place is very labyrinthine and it is, but it's also worth noting that the map system comes with a variety of markers to allow you to make notes-of-sorts for each room in case you need/want to come back there to deal with something specific. Wish you could have an easier way to pick the icon you want instead of just scrolling through all of them, but I appreciate the sheer number of options available.
Some puzzles are mandatory and I think at least for me, I'm just not that fond of the puzzle mechanics for this game. You (barbarian) send your bat (Pip) out to light up certain stones that can cause effects (temporarily or permanently based on each room) that allow you to traverse said rooms. You use the right-analog stick to aim a fruit that sends the bat in that direction. You can also throw stones this way (of which you have limited supplies) or special fruits (of which you also have limited supplies) to either hit switches from a distance or use your bat to do some specific tactics to help make puzzle progression a thing.
The puzzles are oftentimes clever, but sometimes just frustrating because they rely on the player's ability to hit angles properly with a limited supply of items. As an example, there's a very simple puzzle in a secret room that involves a ball and chain swinging back and forth over a pit of spikes. The chest is on the other side of the room behind a locked portcullis. The switch is on a ledge up and to the right of where the ball swings back and forth in a pendulum fashion.
What do you do? Simple, you try and angle and time your stone throw so that it bounces off the ball/chain on the way back to the right, causing it to ricochet onto the ledge with the switch to hit it. I understood exactly what it wanted after the first throw, but with 25 stones in my inventory, I couldn't manage it and had to just abandon the chest to come back later if I wanted to (I didn't). There were no nearby resources to recover my stones, so I couldn't go back and try again quickly. Not all puzzles are like this, but enough are that it can get frustrating (at least for me).
It got to the point where I wasn't really having fun slogging through some puzzles and it kinda took me out of the game. At one point, I found this puzzle that was simply moving around the perimeter of a room quickly while getting a monster inside a maze in the middle of the room to follow you through said maze. There are hazards in the maze that will kill the creature and you need to get it to a certain place in the maze in order to solve the puzzle, but between teleporters in the maze that would fling the creature back the way it came because it sat in a spot for too long and the hazards, I gave up despite knowing what to do after having it die on me about a dozen times or so.
I mention this because it was in the last area I got to before I quit and when I went back to explore the rest of the area, I found my way to a room that had notes that said that the puzzle I gave up on was one of three trials I had to overcome to make progress. Yeah, that was it for me. I wasn't dying to ruthlessly hard platforming (there is some hard platforming in the game), I wasn't missing vital resources when I needed them for an area -- I just couldn't get a stupid creature to follow me through a maze where it was crystal clear where it should go, but I simply couldn't get it to behave the way I needed it to in order to get it there. When progress is beyond my control and in the hands of enemy AI behaving properly, I'm kinda over it.
I'd encourage anyone who wants to play a Metroidvania with deep exploration to it and doesn't mind sometimes-frustrating puzzles to give it a shot. The game has a lot of good things going for it and if you can get past bashing your head against the brick wall that is handling those puzzles, you might have a grand time with this game.
Short answer: It's probably a really good game at its core and if you like puzzle-centric Metroidvanias that encourage exploring, this is probably your cup of tea.
Longer answer: For me at least, it's too puzzle-centric. There's an amazing amount of exploration to be done with secrets hidden in practically every room you enter (and if they're not hidden, it's because you stumbled into a secret room and the chests are there, waiting for you if you can solve a puzzle to reach them).
Fast travel is a little unintuitive at times because some campfires you travel from don't reach areas you think they would when heading back from them. That being said, the caves you explore are labyrinthine in nature and it kinda fits the mold of the game, so it's hard to gripe about that.
The soundtrack is solid. Not much else to say about that because it's an enjoyable listen, but nothing I'm adding to my music collection.
Enemy diversity is a mixed bag, in that there are some interesting enemy choices that have distinct behaviors, but some enemies really are just basic palette swaps with nothing else going for them beyond dealing more damage/taking more damage before dying.
Bosses are a great time, though for all the traveling I did in the game, they feel few and far between. That may just be a perception issue on my part because of getting lost a few times and having to backtrack a bit to figure out where to go next, but I figure it's worth noting.
Bosses (outside of maybe the first) require patience and paying attention to the layout of the room and whatever resources might be there to maximize your chances for survival. Although a barbarian's instinct might be to Hulk-Smash! your way through them, the player better bring a heaping of awareness to the match because you don't get any kinds of items to heal or boost stats or anything of the sort when going into these fights -- it's adapting to the situation or getting wrecked.
I think I enjoyed every boss fight I encountered outside of maybe the boss of the Eternal Palace area, which just felt like a chore to deal with, despite probably being the easiest boss to figure out.
I should give a brief mention to combat in general -- it's extremely basic and consists of you slashy-slashing and occasionally using your bat to manipulate resources around you to deal with enemies. Sometimes you might throw a stone to hit an enemy and elicit a particular behavior from them (be it knocking them off a ceiling or a ledge), but it's mostly just about slashing (or charge-slashing) while not being in the way of whatever the enemy might have in store for you.
I want to mention the map system because I said earlier that the place is very labyrinthine and it is, but it's also worth noting that the map system comes with a variety of markers to allow you to make notes-of-sorts for each room in case you need/want to come back there to deal with something specific. Wish you could have an easier way to pick the icon you want instead of just scrolling through all of them, but I appreciate the sheer number of options available.
Some puzzles are mandatory and I think at least for me, I'm just not that fond of the puzzle mechanics for this game. You (barbarian) send your bat (Pip) out to light up certain stones that can cause effects (temporarily or permanently based on each room) that allow you to traverse said rooms. You use the right-analog stick to aim a fruit that sends the bat in that direction. You can also throw stones this way (of which you have limited supplies) or special fruits (of which you also have limited supplies) to either hit switches from a distance or use your bat to do some specific tactics to help make puzzle progression a thing.
The puzzles are oftentimes clever, but sometimes just frustrating because they rely on the player's ability to hit angles properly with a limited supply of items. As an example, there's a very simple puzzle in a secret room that involves a ball and chain swinging back and forth over a pit of spikes. The chest is on the other side of the room behind a locked portcullis. The switch is on a ledge up and to the right of where the ball swings back and forth in a pendulum fashion.
What do you do? Simple, you try and angle and time your stone throw so that it bounces off the ball/chain on the way back to the right, causing it to ricochet onto the ledge with the switch to hit it. I understood exactly what it wanted after the first throw, but with 25 stones in my inventory, I couldn't manage it and had to just abandon the chest to come back later if I wanted to (I didn't). There were no nearby resources to recover my stones, so I couldn't go back and try again quickly. Not all puzzles are like this, but enough are that it can get frustrating (at least for me).
It got to the point where I wasn't really having fun slogging through some puzzles and it kinda took me out of the game. At one point, I found this puzzle that was simply moving around the perimeter of a room quickly while getting a monster inside a maze in the middle of the room to follow you through said maze. There are hazards in the maze that will kill the creature and you need to get it to a certain place in the maze in order to solve the puzzle, but between teleporters in the maze that would fling the creature back the way it came because it sat in a spot for too long and the hazards, I gave up despite knowing what to do after having it die on me about a dozen times or so.
I mention this because it was in the last area I got to before I quit and when I went back to explore the rest of the area, I found my way to a room that had notes that said that the puzzle I gave up on was one of three trials I had to overcome to make progress. Yeah, that was it for me. I wasn't dying to ruthlessly hard platforming (there is some hard platforming in the game), I wasn't missing vital resources when I needed them for an area -- I just couldn't get a stupid creature to follow me through a maze where it was crystal clear where it should go, but I simply couldn't get it to behave the way I needed it to in order to get it there. When progress is beyond my control and in the hands of enemy AI behaving properly, I'm kinda over it.
I'd encourage anyone who wants to play a Metroidvania with deep exploration to it and doesn't mind sometimes-frustrating puzzles to give it a shot. The game has a lot of good things going for it and if you can get past bashing your head against the brick wall that is handling those puzzles, you might have a grand time with this game.