Yeah, I personally felt like it was a game designed with me in mind. I love to sword 'n' board, but honestly, most games these days don't reward a strategic defense. We're weaned on games like GoW where you can block, but it's almost always better to just kill something faster rather than block it's blows.


Challenging, but fun. Hard, but not cheap. Everytime you die, you know it's from your own mistakes, not the game being cheap.
This game does this so well that it makes you realize that almost no other game manages to do this. So few games train you to be better at how you deal with the game world so that under pressure you can improvise and actually feel like you're better at the game.


You can't just grind and expect everything to be a breeze, it's all about how good you actually are as a player and your ability to adapt.
You could hand the controller to someone who has never played it but is Soul Level 300 and they could get slaughtered in seconds in any world. But hand it to someone who has learned to play the game, don't give them high levels and they still might be able to work themselves out of a tough spot because having skill in the game actually matters.


And the level layout is like Ghouls & Goblins where it's all about memorization and getting better at the combat.
As much as I love that game, if someone told me this I just would hate it as a concept. Older games that force you to memorize feel terrible. The concept of losing souls sounds terrible. But somehow, the reality is different. It's amazing how if someone told you about this game and told you the way it worked, you'd probably spit at the thought.

The way the levels are designed, you don't really hurt for not having a checkpoint. Think of 1-1 where you finally delve deep enough to open a gate from the other side and now you've got a shortcut. Delve a little deeper and you can open another gate for another shortcut. Due to this any boss that's kicking you butt is actually not so far away as it seems. Once you've slowly dungeon crawled for an hour or so you find that avenues are open such that the boss is only a minute or so away in the end.

I love the atmosphere in many of the places. Tower of Latria, once you get over the earlier frustrations of getting around, is amazing. I find 3-2 especially amazing. When I'm in the deeper parts of Stonefang tunnel I feel sooo far from safety and a little claustrophobic. It's a fantastic feeling.