I think difficulty inflation has proceeded to the point where you can't really say that anyone can beat every Soulslike anymore, no. I do think that pretty much anyone can beat Dark Souls 1, and I don't know exactly where the line in the sand is. But I do know that there are too many too difficult games out there now to expect absolutely everyone to be able to beat absolutely all of them. We've already seen gaming journalists fail to beat Isshin for their reviews and genre veterans giving up on Khazan because it's so brutally difficult.
I don't know what I'll play this weekend honestly. I finished AI Limit yesterday, and while there is still the free roguelike DLC to play I'm not sure I'll jump into it right away.
Overall I found the game to be alright, probably like a 7/10, maybe 7.5. Best words I can think of were "solid and competent". It doesn't really do anything particularly badly, but it doesn't really excel at anything either.
I think one problem the game has is that the art direction is just kind of old hat. We've seen this style of post-apocalyptic anime landscapes so many times before, and the fleshy mutant alien enemies and environmental matter is also very well trodden ground. And the lore behind it all is again - like everything else in the game - fine. It does the job but it's not exactly super interesting, exciting or captivating.
I have to mention the voice acting and the protagonist too, which ended up being really annoying to me. The protagonist is supposed to start the game as a blank slate android, and they decided to convey this by having her repeat the last two words other people speak to her in a lobotomized tone of voice for like the first like 75% of the game. It's supposed to contrast with her evolved personality when she starts speaking normally later, but I just found it both immersion breaking and extremely annoying.
I have mixed feelings about the combat: I liked some things but I hated the parry. This game has the worst parry of any game I've played (though this is of course subjective and 100% a skill issue). The problem is that in this game the parry has like a million startup frames, and I just couldn't for the life of me wrap my head around it. You have to press parry like one full second before you get hit, which turns every single parry into a memorisation game of each attack's exact timing instead of an instinctive flow-state reaction. Fortunately there is a weapon with a "normal" reaction-parry as a weapon skill, but... it costs 25% of your Sync bar to use so you can't really use it as often as you would like. At least late game you get Bloodhound Step-style thunder dash you can use as a parry alternative, and I did enjoy playing with that one a lot.
Speaking of Sync, honestly having played a lot of non-Souls games recently the lack of stamina felt... pretty nice. The Sync bar that replaces both mana and stamina works more like a meter in a fighting game or something and I enjoyed the way it played out. It ends up rewarding aggression, and in general managing the Sync bar felt more fun and engaging than constantly backing off and waiting for stamina to regenerate. You get some moments where you're gambling on attacking a couple more times to push your Sync bar above the first threshold so you can use your weapon skill and cause stagger, and stuff like that always felt really good and fun.
Bosses were okay, there was one tough secret boss and one somewhat challenging main story boss, the rest were really manageable. It felt challenging enough for me at my current level of skill and patience (which feels comparatively low), but will probably feel on the easier side for a Souls vet at the top of their game. There was only really that one secret boss that I struggled with, the rest of the bosses I managed to kind of brute force in a couple of attempts even while playing like shit and barely ever parrying.
Overall I can't really complain considering I spent just €18, and I feel like at that price it's worth playing. But that is subjective too, I guess: for me exploring a new world is 90% of the joy of a Soulslike, so just getting some new environments to experience is more enjoyable to me than replaying old Fromsoft games, even though they are way better than this was on their own merits.
Damn these comments are getting long, I'm almost writing whole ass reviews at this point.
