Death of a Wish Steam Charts & Stats

While it pains to me to say so, my experience w/ Death of a Wish so far has been incredibly luke-warm, and given the precedent it sets starting off, I don't imagine things will get better enough to change how the experience feels. Flatly put, Death of a Wish feels like a Lucah expansion, or maybe a Lucah 1.5 if that's more generous. While all of the concepts and systems in Borne of a Dream are included and expanded on here, the overall navigation and world-design has actually been dumbed down, reducing any act of 'exploration' to essentially guessing between left and right and praying you picked the 'wrong' one, then ambling through a series of identical linear rooms and side corridors until you either get to the exit or get to the item you didn't know you needed to get to the exit. There's no indicator which path is best to go first, so all a bad guess gets you is back tracking. Theoretically stripping the navigation down to a series of successive corridors or challenge rooms could be fun--the first game certainly tried near the end, though one of the reasons it failed at doing so, in my opinion, is because of how samey the rooms and enemies felt. In a game like Devil May Cry, even if you're just changing window dressing, the area to area encounters often look and feel quite different. The enemies all have distinct visual designs and functions that dictate how they're meant to be combatted, whereas in Death of a Wish, even though enemies have distinct behaviours and attacks, the visual design is so messy that telling them apart is borderline impossible. Multiple regressive system-level changes have been implemented in this sequel that I fully do not understand: making healing not only limited, but a resource you have to farm, makes no sense to me. Having a stat go up on death that requires you to repeatedly grind previous encounters to drag it back down makes no sense to me. Losing currency/experience on death makes no sense to me. The obtuseness of having to memorize where every individual vendor is, unaided by the map, which, while charming in its childish depictions, is utterly useless when it comes to actually helping with navigation. Attacks from enemies possess both audio and visual cues, but they're indistinct, and inconsistent, to the extent that attempting to parry an attack the same way every time will frequently result in different outcomes, including getting the parry, dodging instead, or missing it completely and taking damage, usually chained into more damage because you have no idea what's going on, whether you dodged or hit the parry or what, until you look at your health, because using the visual or audio elements outside of the UI to tell what is going on is painful at best. Lastly, and again, it saddens me to say this, the themes that Death of a Wish so flagrantly warns you about in its description are more baked in themes than they are literal depictions, at least for the first part of the game. This is a narrative misstep, in my opinion, because the best thing the previous game did (again in my opinion) was its literal depictions of trauma and abuse available largely in the tone poems in the new game plus mode. Even getting to these bits of art was a chore, but it was worth it becuase instead of the vague allusions carrying the first playthrough of the game, now the player gets a chance to see the actual events making up the psychedelic world we're traversing. The reason this is a misstep for me is because this game again returns to vague allusions, or at least refuses to put anything in words so concrete you can 100% be sure what's going on. The main character, Christian, for example, is alluded fairly early on to have had *something* bad happen to him with a priest, and there's even a mention of 'behind', I think... but why not be more direct? Why not just say what is actually happening here, instead of being cagey about it and making the player guess, because the topic is never discussed directly by the characters or even approached outside of the textual allusions? If it happens later that's all well and good, but part of the reason I'm bouncing so hard off this game is that I already played through all of Lucah treating it mostly as a chore on behalf of the game's novelty and themes, and I don't feel like doing the exact same thing again just to carve out tiny pieces of poetry that are still somehow worthwhile. It feels bad to give this game a negative review. I held off buying it forever because I love this studio, I love what their previous game was attempting to do, and I want their projects and endeavours to succeed wholeheartedly. But as someone who wants all of those things, I am just not enjoying the experience of playing this game. It's a nonstop series of mostly empty rooms and nearby guiderails, with rote repeated encounters and vague dialogue and themes. This makes me sad because the first game showed so much potential, but this game seems like a step backwards. Playing this game is frustrating and lonely, and not in a way I feel is worthwhile or intended. I'm really sorry.