Finished Hellpoint, the newest Souls-clone on the market, this time in SPEHS! More specifically, you're on a space station gone bad, Dead Space-style, tasked by the local mysterious AI with figuring out what happened.
At first it seemed rather uninspired, with just a veneer of sci-fi stretched over bog-standard slashy-dodgy Souls. It's faster than regular Souls, too, with the roll replaced by a sidestep like in Bloodborne or Nioh, which I wasn't too happy with, since I always thought these games are more fun when they're strategic endurance-runs rather than l33t action games.
Fortunately, the bad first impression faded once the game got going. The structure is quite different from the other big games in the genre: it's not a seamless open world like Dark Souls, nor a strict level-by-level affair like Demon's Souls or Nioh. Rather, there's a small number of levels, something like ten in total, separated by load screens. Each of these is huge, and contain a multitude of pathways to adjacent levels, probably more than even Dark Souls 1. A big part of the reason why the game grew on me so much is that as you go along and unlock more of the gameworld you discover all these paths that loop back to areas you've already been to, and in more than a few cases lead to sub-areas that are only accessible from particular entry points, making the act of navigating the station and remembering which route to take to get to particular locations a fun challenge. I was even tempted to draw a map. In addition to that, there's also the usual keycard-scavenging leading to backtracking to locked doors and such, and since this game has actual vertical jumping, there's a fair bit of platforming now and again, which literally adds an extra dimension to the whole thing. The result is that out of all the Souls-likes I've tried, this is by the far the one that gets closest to the exploration of Dark Souls 1, even more so that 2 and 3 despite those worlds being continuous and this being full of area transition load screens.
There's a lot to say about the story and the systems and the bosses and all the rest of it, but suffice to say that they range from good enough to very cool. The only other thing worth mentioning is the only thing about Hellpoint that is unique as compared to the rest of the genre, which is the orbit system. The game is set on a space station orbiting a black hole, which moves in real time. Depending on the station's location relative to the black hole, stuff happens in the game, like new enemies spawning, doors opening, and so on. Unfortunately, it feels a bit underutilized, and most of the time you won't notice any difference between the times when the station is in a significant orbital position and those when it isn't. Even so, it's a neat idea, and it ties into some of the game's more obscure secrets.
Really though, it's the world design that makes the game. If you want more of those "oh, so THAT'S how you get to that!" or "wait, I'm back here?" revelations that were almost entirely absent in Dark Souls 2 and 3, I can highly recommend Hellpoint.
Oh, and the free standalone epilogue sucks. Don't bother with it.
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