I've been dreading giving this game a (real) review ever since I finished the main story and looked up the other endings. My thoughts on it are so conflicting but I'll attempt to give an honest review to highlight both it's victories and it's numerous cardinal sins.
I don't like doing this but I'm going to use a pros and cons list to help stay organized because I feel like I could get rambly on this one.

Pros ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

- This game definitely gets down the "feel" of a from soft souls game if only on the surface level in the game play loop and how the combat feels (sometimes)

- The soundtrack, design, animation, and most of the voice acting is great

- A society being overthrown by puppets who in the end were powered by dead people souls somehow is an interesting premise (if not a little too much like iRobot)

- There were some pretty awesome bosses and I liked the way they reused some areas and made enemies "evolve" over time by making infected versions of earlier enemies, different weapon variations, etc

- Deflecting can feel fun at times and the puppet string prosthetic is fun to use

Cons -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

- First off the game being about Pinocchio is a huge detractor. It makes it insanely hard to take this game seriously. So much stuff feels forced into the game just because it was in the original Pinocchio story despite the fact that they're changing things so much that it hardly represents Pinocchio in any way at this point. Did the localization not realize that P sounds like another word in English? Who named the freaking "rise of P" ending? The WHAT organ? It's nearly a miracle we never had to collect "P liquid" or that they didn't refer to the Pinocchio nose on the picture frame as the "P stick".

- This game is crammed full of pointless items, systems, and an overabundance of confusing mechanics. More options doesn't = good if a large portion of the options suck.
- These characters are all boring and one note. I feel like the game expected me to get close to all these hotel people but all they do is give me stuff or sell me stuff or talk about their one character trait over and over again. Yeah I'm Korean and that dog guy saved me! Yeah I'm a rich billionaire who's parents were murdered by a puppet! They never grow or change and you never spend any meaningful time with them. The fox and cat were the closest to having progression but they ruin it by just being dicks to you at every chance they get.

- This game copies way too much from souls games just to say they copied something without thinking of whether it's good or fun. This game is on par with and/or worse than dark souls in the cheap ambushes department. Seriously this game is freaking obsessed with cheap stupid ambushes. Literally anytime I saw an item or chest I walked in backwards just because 80% of the time some stupid mob is waiting for you. This was never fun in dark souls or bloodborne, it was just kind of cheeky but I forgive it in those games because usually it's just now and then.

- Half of these weapons do not mesh well with the combat system and the way you're often forced to play the game to succeed. I could go into more detail about certain enemy attacks and move sets that bugged me and felt like they were clashing with the style of gameplay but I'll just stop here.

- I absolutely hate that you can't cancel out of attacks to do a deflect. This is my personal opinion and I learned to overcome my desire to want to do attack cancel deflects but it still felt bad. After having played Sekiro and Sifu going back to a game with deflects like this felt like having to write a letter to someone after years of having email.

- This camera is the real boss of the game. The fact that the camera doesn't auto adjust angle or almost ever auto adjust at all is extremely damning and frustrating. So many times I got stuck in corners while trying to dodge an attack or stuck in freaking enemy geometry and couldn't see where I was going. Also faster enemies like some late bosses or the second phase of the archbishop were an absolute nightmare with the camera flailing everywhere and just feeling terrible.

- The overall quality of the English localization is just not very good at all. I would forgive this if this was a smaller Indie studio but everything else about the game feels AAA so why is the English this bad? There aren't that many misspelled words though there are some but mostly the bad grammar and strangely worded sentences are what frustrates me. As someone who worked a Japanese to English translation job in the past I'm seeing lots of cases were I think direct or even machine translation might have been used with very little or maybe even zero native English speaker proofreading.

- Lastly (I promise) is that this story is just so weird. The way lies are integrated as a game play mechanic is so half baked. Sometimes the things you have to lie about are your opinions (Am I beautiful? Do you think she loved me? Was I a good dad? etc) so at first I thought "oh maybe the lies are the 'good person' answers" but no there are straight up other times where you have to lie to get the warm fuzzy points by lying to someone which leads them to somewhere dangerous. So many other parts of the story are just so forced either to make the game more like dark souls or to include something from Pinocchio. Seldom is anything added to the game at all if it's not to fulfill one of these delusions.

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Yet the game was actually kind of fun. This is all on just some bosses being cool and my affinity for the souls game play loop. To summarize my thoughts, the game feels like a symphony with a ton of different melodies going on but the melodies seldom go together very well and when they do it feels entirely on accident. It feels like someone did an AI generated from soft game and yeah if you squint a little it looks like a from soft game but if you take any time to look at the details you'll see weird artifacts and mangled hands and strange geometry in the background. Ultimately worth a shot if you like games similar to dark souls or bloodborne, but vastly flawed. It feels to me like so many people give this game a pass for all of these flaws just because of the Victorian/belle epoque/whatever vibe it gives off and this bugs me like crazy.

As a dad of international children growing up in the US the message of this game hits close to home. My kids are still small but I've definitely worried about them being ashamed of their international heritage and I've grown up meeting all sorts of international people with similar and very differing experiences to what happened in this game. I definitely felt for the mom when her son didn't come home on his birthday even after she cooked all that food.

But to get to why I have this rated 3 stars and not 5 it's mainly the cooking minigames that drove me crazy. Yes the food looks delicious. Yes it made me hungry. However trial and error guessing gameplay is not ever fun in my opinion and this is already on top of my low tolerance for "swish your mouse around!" minigames. Why would I assume that you can use an empty bowl on a full pot of chicken? Why don't you auto fail me for putting in the tomatoes early? Why do I have to redo this long batter spreading segment every time even if I got everything up to that point right? I just constantly got stuck on the cooking and even when I had to use the hints it's basically just a long version of simon says. Really this game should've been a short film or something. I get that using the video game medium you can reach a certain audience but this just didn't feel like it warranted a game. Or maybe I will just never like cooking simulators? I don't know. I enjoy cooking in real life for the most part though I'm not a fanatic by any means.

Back to the story though the way Kavin goes about living his life and the circumstances around it were frustrating to me as well. Why doesn't he ever have some of his friends over? They could try some Tamil food that they might like which I think would make him less afraid to eat at school. Why doesn't Venba have any non-Indian friends? This is maybe a reflection of a time where people were less tolerant of different cultures I guess, but c'mon there had to be someone, right? Why did Kaavlan get beat up after work? Doesn't he work with Suresh who I presume is also Indian? It was just frustrating to see Kavin grow up and completely shun his family's culture and not realize that he was being stupid until his dad died and his mom moved back to India. It also frustrated me that he quit his job instead of working on a TV show that could've helped more people around the world (or at least Canada) learn about the Tamil people and tell people who are shy and ashamed of their cultures that they don't need to be ashamed? I think this detail frustrated me the most.

While I have to admit off the bat this was sort of a slog for me I don't think it was a bad game by any means. The art style isn't my favorite but it has sort of a cartoon network kind of charm and really goes hard on the well-loved in Japan trope of "kimo-kawaii" or "gross-cute" or whatever. The gameplay also has some great ideas with the occupants of the hotel who want to do in you in gradually increasing over time. The biggest complaint I had was how mundane and simple so many of the tasks were for setting up a soul steal. I would've liked some more in depth puzzles or more chances to get to know the characters in a deeper way but most of the time I would get a soul and be surprised at how little work it took. I also wish the "horror show" segments and chases were more intense but I'm kind of a glutton for punishment when it comes to horror games.

The relatively star-studed Japanese cast of voice actors do a great job but tbh Judgement boy in English steals the freaking show.
(Played in Japanese, watched a stream in English)

This is the first time in a while I've laughed at a game that was actually trying to make me laugh (though that didn't last the entire runtime). Honestly this would've made a great show on cartoon network or something. The artstyle and music are such a vibe and the horror sections are very creative and go hard as well. I definitely ran into a few glitches here and there and I wish there was a little more variety than just the pick and throw physics/platforming gameplay. They also introduce some really interesting enemies later but just for one floor which is too bad but overall I had a blast.