Mark of the Deep Review (Keith)
Mark of the Deep is profoundly frustrating in a way that makes it less than the sum of its parts. Your attacks are slow, short-ranged, and extremely committal - when you attack you cannot dodge or end the animation early. This means that you will often be punished for attacking by a move that an enemy used after you attacked, and the only way to avoid this is to slowly bait out enemy attacks and exclusively retaliate. However, your dodge is too slow, stiff, and bloated with start and endlag to let you properly position for this sort of bob-and-weave playstyle. Enemies themselves are atrocious HP sponges who are happy to stunlock you and are put in absurdly dense groups even before considering the overly long and overly frequent arena fights. The core of the game's movement comes from its grappling hook, but this too is crippled with problems. It is slow and imprecise to aim, it offers limited invincibility when travelling making its combat utility low for either approaching or escaping, and your travel speed is very slow with a lot of endlag.
One can scream until they're blue in the face that "Souls-Like elements" means limited healing, mook enemies that kill you easily, complex and punishing bosses, and labyrinthine maps. This isn't anywhere close to having the deftness and clarity of design that justifies that difficulty and rewards mastery of its systems. This is not Hyper Light Drifter. This is not Tunic. This is not even Death's Door. It's an exercise in frustration with game design hiccups that would've been seen as amateurish and clumsy 20 years ago, in a saturated genre where there's no excuse for failing at basic things like "how does it feel to attack" and "can the player see where they are when an enemy is near them".
It's a shame to be so harsh to the game because despite everything else the love the developers had is clear and the Portuguese voice acting has a lot of character, but the game itself is just not good.