Overall this is a classic Castlevania game - responsive controls, interesting mechanics and an ok balance of progression and grinding.

Things I didn't like:
- The random drops for the DSS cards is harsh in places, so you're grinding in one spot until you get one you want.
- Some card combinations are essential for survival, making the grind for specific cards even more of a chore.
- The cross sub-weapon is basically required for boss fights, due to the low survivability in those closed rooms. You will end up back tracking to get it again and again if you lose it.

Overall I did enjoy the playthrough! It's pretty tough in parts until you level up but I enjoyed my time with the game.

I've seen a lot of 5 star reviews for the story, the setting, the characters and for me I only liked 1 character in the whole game - everyone else is a total asshole, including your own character!

It's set in a fictional world that models eastern Europe, with a culture class between multiple groups of people, political ideology struggles and groups like unions, governments and private organizations vying for power. You play a detective who wakes up with no memory, no knowledge of their identity and are tasked with investigating a murder in the city. Your partner (the character that I like) accompanies you during your detective work, but is more of a sounding board than a true partner, so you will be figuring things out on your own.

There's a very complex and detailed attribute system where you have about 20 total attributes grouped into 4 sections like Psyche, Motor skills, Intuition etc and these all play into dice rolls for crucial discoveries. You have a lot of passive knowledge that's revealed to you as you play, based on the scores of things like perception or empathy, and a lot of this comes up during conversations with people too. There's a lot of depth and possibility here, but it also leads to an information overload at times.

You also have 2 key attributes - health and morale. Some actions can injure you and affect health, whereas some conversations, reflections (you have an inner monologue that talks to you too) can impact morale, and if either of these 2 drop to 0 you die. This leads to my first frustration - if you choose certain dialogue options (even those where you're reflecting on something or someone), you morale can drop without warning. If you don't have items to regain that stat, you can simply click a choice and just die right there.

My second frustration comes from the ability check system. Often you can hit an ability check to learn something or convince someone of something, and they can be retried after some time. Others can only be retried if you increase a specific attribute (e.g. add 1 to a strength check to try again). The challenge comes from how you gain XP, which is primarily from completing side quests. In the later part of the game you can complete all the available side quests, so there is no way to increase a stat, and all stats have maximums so you can have a stat that cannot be increased. This leads to the advice of "savescumming" certain checks because you can be softlocked in the game if you fail - a really bad design choice.

Outside of issues with the game mechanics, after a few hours I lost interest in the setting. It's such a complex and detailed place to understand, both from character choice and motivation to just understanding the power struggles and situation in general, that I soon started skipping dialogue because I couldn't pay attention to it any more. That led to becoming uninterested in a lot of the characters, and so my connection to the world was lost.

I would highly recommend finding out for yourself if this game resonates for you. It wasn't my thing but it could be yours.