Review written at 6 hrs of gameplay. I will push myself to finish or even platinum.

Long story short:
Imagine this is lies of p
>>> but it doesn't reward you for anything
>>> but mechanics are absolutely unclear
>>> but rolling / iframes are imaginary and just for lulz
>>> but platforming was made by someone who absolutely hates the players
>>> but the only balanced thing is DLSS / FSR
>>> but game is so poorly optimized that you will struggle playing 1440 p 120 fps with 7900 xt / 4080. Great achievement from the developer.
I cannot believe how stupid I was to buy this one. I just thought the mixed opinions must be from people who don't know how to git gud.
Please do NOT buy this game if you are into soulslikes.
Instead of this hot mess go and buy Lies of P or literally go change your money to coins and throw it off of the bulding one at a time. This would still be more thrilling experience and much better money management. You, as a reader of this review, cannot even comprehend how much I hate myself for not listening to steam reviews.
Please do not repeat my mistake.
Yours truly,
Krystian <3

update 1 :
I put 10 hrs more.
Game is even trashier than at first. Extremely poor balance of enemies. Bosses are not any sort of danger. This game is copy paste enemies one next to another. I hope devs read the reviews because definitely they watch youtube videos on how to farm "vigor", their equivalent of souls/runes/blood echoes. I truly despise this game. I despise it for extreme lack of creativity, absurd amount of boss recycling as mobs and also for underdelivering everything it promised. I am very close to saying this game is 5% legit game and then it is elaborate asset flip eerily resembling Dark Souls 2 (SoTFS not vanilla, just for clarity).
Shame on you CI Games, Deck13 and Bandai Namco.
On top of that, just for this game I decided to switch 7900 xt to 4080 super (yeah, ikr having 2 cards is weird). Both cards cannot pull off stable 120 framerate at 1440p. Nice

Long story short- like majority of you I am just a homeboy who platinums fromsoftware games.
How am I supposed to play this dlc? Let alone enjoying it?

1. Game out of nowhere decides for me that if I want not to be one shot by mobs I need to collect some imaginary items to upgrade my “favourite Miquella’s boy points”. If I wanted forced exploration, I would simply play Zelda. Really? 2 k hits one shots. What is the purpose?

2. DLC again makes a bold move to give you much fewer sites of grace. Coincidentally it gives you almost none where Miyazaki had “LMAO let’s make it crash bandicoot level” moment where you need to jump with 10/10 Jeff Hardy prime early 2000’s WWE precision.

3. How are you dealing with smashing a 20 k health mob and getting smithing stone(7) x 8 as a reward? I am just wondering how people can gaslight this as a great game design.

4. How are you supposed to learn patterns of the bosses? If you get consistently one shot by bosses such as Byle the dread how the hell are you able to learn it?

5. Throughout all souls games and other soulslikes I am using str/dex build. I fell in love with this franchise because it allowed me to play how I want to play. I was never punished for it. I just had to expand my skillset. I am not using any super duper bonk weapons. For this dlc I chose “gut’s sword”. DLC gives huge gatekeep vibes indicating you should play bleed and whatever else Miyazaki’s team though would be a good idea.

6. Optimization of this dlc is absolutely terrible. Frame rate drops in boss arenas? Really? I have a really good rig and you could expect or even demand stable 60 fps at the price of an average new game. We are talking about only dlc here.

7. I don’t mind spoilers so I took a look at the final boss. 2 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ years waiting for some intricate and interesting story and as a final boss we get a meme of Temu twins from Dark souls 3. As the cherry on top just add a hint of incest. Yeah… great Miyazaki. Satisfying conclusion to one of the most hyped DLCs ever.

8. I came here to write this while trying to manage the boss where you have a Midir style drop enter into arena. Of course drop is much longer than to midir just to make you more frustrated every time you go in. I will not bother to check boss’s name as fromsoftware didn’t bother to give a single thought to this project. Nevertheless, level designers with this one decided to change the project to another DLC for Cuphead. Ferocious combos, horse out of nowhere charging at you, chaotic signaling.

9. To enter the dlc you need to kill radahn and then Mohg. I reached this point upon getting level 100. When you are level 100 entering dlc you are one-shot by any mob in the dlc. Again flawless game design. Can we have any statement on what level you SHOULD go to DLC? Boss health pools and damage indicate lvl 230-250, loots strongly indicate level 60-100.

10. I am absolutely disappointed. If you just want to comment get good, sure do it. I expected difficulty and I really enjoy difficulty. However, they delivered nioh dlc level 1 run type of artificial difficulty.

If I could ask you to do anything, it would be to refund.