Krat’s belle-époque streets rot under a puppet frenzy and a petrification disease, and the city’s collapse is told almost entirely through what is left lying around: newspaper scandals, landmark guides, confession letters, records and the residents of a hotel that doubles as home base. The dark fairytale worldbuilding rewards reading everything, from a ghost’s vendetta to an orphaned inventor’s backstory, and the tone stays somber without ever becoming dour. The lie system gives the playthrough a narrative spine, visibly humanising the puppet protagonist through growing hair, an accepting cat and moments of warmth, and connecting directly to the ending’s choice. Few games make honesty and deception feel like mechanics this legible.
The combat is built on perfect guarding rather than dodging, closer to Sekiro and Bloodborne than Dark Souls, and it punishes old habits hard: playing it like a Souls game leads to early deaths until the block-first loop clicks. Chip damage is refunded by attacking, stagger windows open after consecutive perfect guards, and fury attacks demand perfect guards because dodging usually fails. The loop is demanding but learnable, and once it clicks the game opens up completely.
Weapon versatility is the game’s standout system. The handle and blade assembly lets any weapon become any build, converting a strength weapon into a technique weapon to match a respec, with cranks altering scaling further, and the rotation through saber, fire axe, glaive, scythe, twin dragon sword, bow, lightning sword and poison club never stops being interesting. Legion arms add utility layers (electric blitz, an overheat flamethrower, throwable blades), and the P-organ respec system, tied to the gold coin fruit, is generous enough to encourage experimentation. The quality-of-life design is elite throughout: ergo drops outside the boss arena, abundant star fragments, a Spectre summon and a boss-memory rematch mode.
The record and music system is the emotional anchor. Tracks are found and then played in full at the hotel, and the somber classical tone fits the city’s grief, with one wistful track standing out as the best thing found across the entire run. The DLC extends the concept impressively: a roughly ten-hour snowbound prequel chapter with timeline-switching stargazers that let the player walk the living city before its collapse, fighting alongside a tracker companion in one of the campaign’s best encounters and exploring a zoo from the past.
Boss design splits sharply. The best fights are genuine highlights: a guardian whose size never breaks the camera, a duel-worthy noblewoman, and a tracker-assisted fight against a two-faced overseer. The worst are the game’s undoing: multi-phase bosses that regain a full second health bar and switch to an entirely different moveset, contrasted unfavourably with the genre’s half-health conventions, and two DLC bosses that heal mid-fight and provoked lowering the difficulty on principle. The camera on large enemies and in tight spaces is a systemic problem, ending fights before the player can, and delayed or feinted attacks with enormous combos drain patience across many encounters.
Small friction accumulates. The durability system is rendered nearly pointless by an endlessly reusable grinder item, an odd design contradiction. Weapons bounce off walls and lamp posts on narrow paths, UI text boxes vanish before item lore can be read, and the sprint-then-flick jump input produces a weak arc that makes optional platforming feel worse than it should. Being wedged between enemies and the environment recurs often enough to annoy, and the jump’s Dark-Souls-2-style input is a strange inheritance. None of these are fatal, but all are felt.
Overall, this is a phenomenal, must-play Soulslike whose elite combat, worldbuilding and quality-of-life design survive its most frustrating bosses intact. The parry-centric loop, the weapon assembly and the lie system give it an identity no peer matches, and the DLC’s scope makes the package genuinely complete. Multi-phase resets, a sometimes-hostile camera and two heal-mid-fight bosses are real frustrations, but the whole remains one of the genre’s best executions.
