At the end of the day, the juice is not worth the squeeze. Unless you really like the theme or the setting, there's likely other survival games that will reward your time and money more.
This is especially true if you attempt to play solo. Like many survival games, Soulmask was designed for large-group multiplayer and unfortunately its inclusion of AI tribe members into the survival formula more fails than succeeds at alleviating the uphill struggle facing a solo player. In the end I had to lower the difficulty a lot and switch off several of the game's systems to get through the back half.
The first major issue is that this game leans into the grind in a way that put even ARK to shame. Tools, weapons and armor do not just have durability that requires basically the full price of the item to repair when broken while also lasting through maybe one boss fight, each time it is repaired its maximum durability is reduced. Which means that things have to be re-crafted constantly because they just wear out way too fast, which of course requires gathering the resources for it over and over. While in theory the grind can be off-loaded to the NPC tribesmen, the gathering and conversion rates are designed with that in mind, so that in practise the game still ends up being a slog of constant resource acquisition of the things the tribesmen use up to gather the other resources needed to keep going. After a lot of grief, I switched off durability as a system entirely because I couldn't stand that endless treadmill any more.
The other major issue is the combat system. Like many other games, Soulmask wants to lean into Souls-like combat, which I'm usually a major fan of. Except the multiplayer-first design rears its head. Bosses are not designed to have movesets survivable by a single person and do not leave enough time between their attacks to actually recover unless somebody else manages to draw the boss's attention. And the base aspect that makes Souls-like bosses work, which is that you learn their movesets through trial and error, ends up being undercut by the durability system. Because each time you fight the boss, your weapons and armor lose durabiltity and likely break. Which means you have to repair them, over and over again, spending resources gathered over hours just because the boss randomly decided to do several hard moves in a row (yes, there is a pretty big moveset for each boss, especially in the Shifting Sands DLC and the choice of which it does next is completely random). And combat damage is generally overtuned in general, which means you end up spending a lot of time having to restore health, or frantically trying to find a safe corner where you can use that bandage without getting interrupted by the many, many archers hovering at the edge of every battle. The game will also often throw pretty large groups of enemies at you, which also completely clashes with the Souls-like design. And unfortunately trying to use tribesmen to alleviate these issues does not work sufficiently, since they of course can't actuall smartly play against the bosses and mostly just serve as mild distractions that fall over after the first blow. I had to lower the combat difficulty a lot to get to something where I didn't feel like combat was just there to punish me.
The tribesmen system itself is an opaque gacha which is never fully explained. Each tribesman has a rarity (who knows what that does), possibly some traits, different maximum levels in the available skills and different combat abilities that can be unlocked, and none of that can be determined in advance. Without the (thankfully free) Golden Legend DLC which adds a mask that allows you to scan people beforehand, the only way to discover all the non-rarity things is by subduing and recruiting the tribesman, a not-too onerous process that however still takes up time. Which means that growing your tribe is also a grind, in which you have to hope to find good candidates, then subdue them without killing them (or getting them killed by friendly fire from all their friends) and then hope they turn out not to have rolled bad trait combinations. And annoyingly for solo players, the cap for how many NPC tribesman an individual player is allowed to recruit is just low enough that earmarking a few slots for new recruits you might end up having to release again is going to make your resource gathering worse.
The masks themselves, the sort of star of the games, are, well, fine but not overwhelming. Each mask has some sort of utility niche it's supposed to be good at, but for the most part it doesn't really end up mattering that much because the combat system isn't giving you the breathing space to really diversify.
I am grateful that the difficulty settings are extensive enough that I could tailor the experience to what worked for me, but I think one should evaluate a game by its default difficulty state, and unfortunately, at those settings it's not a pleasant or engaging experience. A large part of my playtime (I only played the Shifting Sands DLC) was spent waiting for my airship to fly over the map, because while airships have an auto-drive move, they still only drive when there's a person at the wheel. So you have to point the ship in the right direction and then just sit there not doing anything while the world slowly moves past you.
The reason I kept going was mostly because I'm a sucker for Ancient Egypt as a setting, so the DLC tempted me. But unless you're a freak like me, I don't think that's enough to overcome the downsides.
