Repost: because apparently my initial edit replying to the haters being rude in the comments was too harsh. I guess it's okay for people to be rude and trash talk my opinions, but I can't talk shit back with a blanket statement...

Anyway, TL;DR here: I love most souls and souls-like games. I've been a fan since vanilla Darksouls 2. But despite this game's minor bit of originality, IMHO, it falls very short of AAA standards due to flawed design choices and poor execution, poor optimization aside. This game could be a lot better with a few tweaks to some of the game's main systems.

I play on ps5, and even then, in it's current state this game is still a 2/10, imho. Maybe that's too harsh for some people, but right now I'm not convinced it deserves a better score. It's literally a trash soulslike. The trashiest souls-like ever made, second only to the original LotF. I wanted to jump on the hype train, but after playing up to Mendacious Visage and now Hushed Saint, I just can't bring myself to like this game anymore. I'm almost to the point that I don't even want to waste the time or energy to finish it. I'd like to get my money's worth out of it, but it's nothing but a chore to play this garbage.

MV literally forces you to play in the umbral. Hushed Saint basically says, "Play in the umbral if you want the easiest experience." Wrong. Using the jank ass lantern to pop the little eyeballs is a wasted effort because it leaves you wide open for attacks.

The game doesn't put an "emphasis" on playing in the umbral, but literally forces you to play if you want to progress through the vast majority of the game because most of the paths are blocked my gaps or deep water, thus requiring you to shift into the umbral to progress through each level. It's poor design. Points for trying, but still poor design.

It's flawed. There's almost no reason to ever play in the normal realm other than to escape the reaper entities, which will still kill you in the normal realm in certain areas if you're using the lantern to sloooowlyyy travvverrsse through the umbral because your character apparently doesn't have enough braincells to run and hold a lantern at the same time.

Yeah sure the combat is faster and more frantic than any souls/lite game, but it's literally just spamming light attacks at waves of enemies and hoping to not dodge roll off a cliff when your lock-on camera swaps to a new enemy or causes you to do an instant 180 thanks to enemies suddenly charging past you. Going back to the dodge, you can't even roll through groups of enemies. So if you get stuck in a corner, you might as well kiss most of your sanguine charges goodbye if you even manage to get out at all.

But the other aspects of combat are just piss poor. Heavy weapons are the only ones that seem to do any real damage but cost ridiculous amounts of stamina to just fight a single enemy at a time. Then dual-wielding shreds through most enemies and keeps them perma staggered, but it's almost like hitting bosses with wet noodles for most of the 1h weapons in the game. And upgrading them barely does any good. Plus, stat scaling is like adding extra water to an already wet noodle of a scaling system. "Whoo, I got 2 extra damage from my 1 extra stat allocation. Hell yeah, I'm sure this will shave a whole 30 seconds off of this 10-minute fight."

But bosses? What is the point of even having armor against the bosses. Your defensive stats mean jack shit. You might as well play naked and dual wield 2 heavy weapons because no matter what your defensive stats are, bosses are still going to slap you for 30-50% of your health bar back to back, or 1-shot you with a randomly timed, lightning fast attack in the middle of you using your potion. But wait, then you go into the umbral. And all of a sudden, the boss no longer wants to be in your face, so they start kiting you and jumping around at lightspeed so you can't hit them, even with ranged attacks. Because Adyr forbid you from actually getting your health back when you're already on your last leg. So now you have to resort to the safest bet in your arsenal, spamming ranged attacks with throwables (because taking the long ass time to actually aim just a light attack with the bows and crossbow is pointless in a boss fight, especially the fights with multiple ads).

And then come in the random framerate drops and texture popping. Poor optimization is usually the least of my concerns, but in a game like this, framerate means a lot. And when I'm getting sub 40 fps in areas with dense mobs and lots of ranged spells flying at me, the combat just becomes more of a chore.

So as it stands, in it's current state, most of the game is just a chore. A lackluster attempt at something original in a soulslike. Points for the minor amount of originality, but still flawed because of poor execution on a lot of the core aspects.