izigame.me

Out of all the souls-likes this one comes very close to the originals (specifically to Dark Souls 3) in terms of quality of level design and combat design while still doing its own thing.
The levels are mostly linear with some occasional shortcuts to checkpoints. Backtracking to previous areas is very minimal, most of the time you need to go back only to give a quest item to an NPC. To compensate for its linearity the game puts varying environments inside single level which leads to different gameplay situations and encounters. It even has some references to Dark Souls encounters e.g. rolling boulders you have to run past while hiding in nooks, or big open area with a cannon shooting at you from afar.
Combat is slightly tweaked compared to Souls games to be more fast-paced and reactionary. Regular blocking drains your health, but you can regain it by landing attacks on enemies and not getting hit in the process since getting hit cancels this regainable health (and drains regular health as well). Dodging is an option but is still risky since you don't have as many invincibility frames to reliably dodge all attacks. So you have one last option - perfect blocks which you are basically forced to learn since landing a perfect block only drains your stamina and also does heavy poise damage to the enemy. Poise works similarly to Sekiro - you can slowly chip at it with attacks or you can quickly drain it with perfect blocks. But the enemy won't just stagger when you fully drain their poise - you must also land a fully charged heavy attack. The problem is that you have limited time to do so, and you have to find a good opening since heavy attacks are slow. And after all that you can finally land a critical attack which does a lot of damage. All those mechanics combined result in a combat system which can be more punishing than the one in Dark Souls if you don't utilize all of them.
The typical flow of a boss fight - perfect block most attacks, dodge or block the ones you are not comfortable with perfect blocking, drain the poise meter, land a charged heavy attack to stun, do a critical strike, repeat (all while landing your own attacks). Sounds straightforward but in reality you have to learn the moveset and the timings for perfect blocks the hard way since the game does not offer any indication of when an attack is going to land.
And here lies my only issue. When it comes to telegraphing attacks some enemies do it nicely and you can visibly predict the incoming strike. While other enemies have very fast or hectic moves where you have to memorize when to block. The easy solution would be to give more frames to land a perfect block so it would be easier to block such attacks. But it will obviously alter timings for all other attacks as well making the game less challenging overall (whether it's good or bad is up to you). Another solution is just to tweak the animation of those attacks which is harder for developers hence they probably are not going to bother with it.
Another minor thing - the game is quite lengthy and close to the end it started to feel a little dragged on. Particularly the last area could be trimmed down a bit.
Overall, the game is great. Get it if you want something that is very close to From Software games in terms of quality.