izigame.me

It's a lot of fun. It distills the essence of Dark Souls along with a minimalist, almost retro dark fantasy theme. My primary gameplay pain point is how the world appears to open up once you reach the Forest, but you're actually going to find a lot of blocked paths until you follow the real, intentional road forward. Many of these momentary dead ends have nothing - no secrets, no rewards - so it sort of begs the question "Why allow me to wander about at all if there's only one way forward?"
Outside of the gameplay, there's not a lot of lore here. In Dark Souls and other Souls-likes storytelling is often done through a combination of the environment and item descriptions. As this game has few items in comparison to most Souls-likes, there are especially few windows to get an understanding of the world. This leaves the environments - which are often very minimalist, to do all the heavy lifting. There are certainly "scenes" - I get that I'm a prisoner for some reason, and that there are people in the forest who hunt and trap animals (and other people), and there's a church the guys from the mountain burnt down for some reason (maybe), but the "why?" of these things is a question that never seems to get asked and hasn't yet been answered.
Besides that, the game interrupts you upon exit roughly two hours into the game experience to ask for a review. It does this likely because you're beyond the refund window. It explains that it will only do this once. I get why it does this - its hard to get traction as an indie game, but its not something I see outside of the mobile game market and I don't really care to reward trends which merge the two. If you must beg for a review it shouldn't interrupt the player. You have plenty of screen space, put it somewhere on the pause menu. I was actually thinking "Hey, I should leave a review" when your analytics-based sales-driver leapt out of the woodwork and drove me to leave one of the few thumbs downs the game has seen so far.
Addendum: Part of the way through the game you will encounter a door that is locked by a "puzzle" which the game intends for you to solve by coordinating in real time with two other players, each playing in their own separate game. To solve the "puzzle" you must each equip different and very particular sub-optimal loadouts (chosen at random and enforced via stat limitations), then rush to defeat a fairly powerful enemy within a short amount of time. You must then observe the symbol it drops and take it back to the puzzle room and input the symbol as well as the symbols your partners have earned. The door requires three symbols. You can try to brute force this by equipping a loadout, rushing to the enemy (and killing a group of enemies along the way, some of whom prefer to keep their distance and so will actively run away from you), defeat the enemy, rush back, equip a new loadout at the fire, kill the same group of enemies and the elite, then return to the room and input the second symbol, then finally guess at which of the fifteen or so symbols make up the third slot (but you have to check the door each time as there is no confirmation). You have roughly five minutes or so to do all of the above.
I'm cool with puzzles requiring players to coordinate in separate states. I loved Void Stranger and Animal Well for this. Yes it is "optional" in the same way that every game with side-content is "optional" to those who wish to 100% complete the game. But this is asinine.
The rewards for solving this "puzzle" are an additional stat point (always relevant) and a unique loadout item.
Shout out to the user Hibachi who has created this guide to help save your sanity when it comes to solving this "puzzle": https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3365435074