Steelrising

Very enjoyable combat, visuals, storytelling, world, atmosphere, and character progression. The storytelling is efficient and unobtrusive, and I found myself wanting to know more rather than annoyed by the dialogue and text. It's totally skippable. This has all the fundamentals of a souls-like, so nothing is going to surprise you if you've played one of those before. They have some novel approaches to weapons and stats that make it worth playing. Every weapon is theoretically balanced--you can level up the first weapon you get and use it the whole game if you want. Weapons all scale mainly with (strength) or (dexterity) but have different move sets and special abilities, so once you pick strength or dexterity, you find the weapons with the move sets you enjoy and special abilities you like. The specials include projectile attacks, an elemental damage buff, a parry + counter attack, a shield that can parry-stun if you time it right, and a variety of "bladestorm" mobile aoe attacks. Some weapons can do elemental attacks, which can stack up special effects like frozen or burning in the usual way, although interestingly you can spec your character into stacking effects more quickly, which I really like--you can use the elemental buffs for extra damage, or for their special debuffs on the enemy. I've found the game decently easy, but I've played a lot of these games. I one-shot a lot of the bosses, sometimes with extra potions. The one-time use potions heal you over twenty seconds, only your flask heals you instantly, after the animation. Still, combat is satisfying and strategic, and I've never been bored during the combat or exploration segments. The lowest part of the game is the sub quests, because they require you to backtrack over levels you've already beaten. You get to open up shortcuts as you go, but it is still a pain to navigate sometimes, especially the first few you do. It's much easier to navigate the first time you explore, because you're just going forward, but once everything's been opened, it actually becomes a little harder to navigate since the levels are mazes and you can't just go towards your objective. They do give you items that teleport you back to the fast travel point once you finish a side quest. Side quests are totally skippable, but still basically worth it. The second worst thing about the game is that it shoves you into boss fights sometimes. It does usually give you the option to talk to an NPC (usually through a locked door, like in Asteregos) and they will give you hints about how to fight the boss (or what they are immune to). The third worst thing is giving you occasional binary choices you don't fully understand but seem like they will affect the ending. Choices should matter, but give us context.