it's a tough one to nail down, because it's got some points that bring it down. By far the best part for me were the dungeons, which were overall very well designed Zelda-like lock & key dungeons, which I like. It was also interesting having to use the abilities of both characters. The writing has overall a very consistent (I don't mean great, just consistent) quality. For the most part, it's not excellent and it has a few pace-killing moments (like a cooking errand run for part of Arc (I'm using arcs to navigate as some have several chapters) 3 and a SO annoying train ride movie star & terrible stealth section thing in Arc 4), but Arcs 5 & 6 have genuinely pretty good writing and gameplay. The final arc in particular was really good with one of the best chase sequences I've seen since, I don't know, Celeste maybe (which is my #1). I also really liked the cooking-based healing system. You don't pick up healing items, you pick up (and buy) food ingredients that you cook to get food to carry around at various places which give varying degrees of health. You'll discover more recipes and gain more ingredients as the game progresses. I really liked this.

Overall I enjoyed the game, it was not fantastic, but it was enjoyable.

For anyone who played this game before the "Afterlife" updates, I can confirm that it is much improved, in fact as far as I'm concerned it's pretty much a different game. It's not just a balance fix here and there but complete redesigning of many things. For one it actually feels like a metroidvania game now with abilities gained after bosses and actually needed to access areas and it's not just in a linear fashion anymore. It's actually quite open, I have to rate this as one of my favourite metroidvanias. It's also been given great improvements to the story. The story is pretty damn good, in fact I cried a bit during the true ending it was fantastic. The combat is also really good and I did not feel it was inaccessible, except for one point. This brings me to the one downside, the true ending is somewhat skill-gated and I think it's horrible practice to gate off narrative content, especially endings. To access it you need to defeat 5 Heroic Bosses, which are souped-up refights against previous bosses. As is often the case when souping-up bosses some of them become quite inaccessible. I was able to do it, but there are definitely people who would not be able to. And while this can be watched via youtube, the path towards the true ending really is amazing and something everyone should get to experience for themselves.