Combat plays horribly from the top down perspective, enemy windups are insanely fast and stunlock the player instantly sending you back 5 screens. Which wouldn't be so bad but the player movement is slow and painful, and a lot of design choices rub salt in the wound of the unpleasant combat. Animations all around are bad and it doesn't seem like any thought was put into enemy encounter design, just spam enemies in rooms. Enemies also have visible stamina and mana bars, but basically can't deplete the former and the latter doesn't seem to do anything, so that information is just useless.
Starting the player with no simple access to a weapon is quite annoying. None of them are locked behind particularly difficult challenges, you just have to walk past most enemies, but it means combat is basically pointless until you find one of the weapons. I played for over 45 minutes before I found a weapon. It wasn't enjoyable.
Putting gameplay critical information like how to use consumables or perform alternative attacks inside pamphlets is a bizarre choice. Particularly when you can just check the control binding screen for that information. I'm not really sure what the goal of the pamphlets is, either the player checks the control scheme and they are useless, or the player will be frustrated by important mechanics being taught to them by random missable objects on the ground.
The campsite UI is confusingly designed and annoying to navigate, and the level up screen being separated feels arbitrary since camp fires always feature both. The UI also has a hard to read font and black on grey text is doubly annoying to read. It's also annoying that consumables are so readily available but not explained in the tutorial and not equipped at all by default. This feels totally nonsensical to me.
It's clear to me a huge amount of effort has been put into building the complicated combat system, but the combat itself isn't actually enjoyable at all. Attacks are overly punishing, stunlocks are common for AI and players alike, healing is slow and irrelevant in most combat, AI are highly aggressive and often lack punish windows and it feels to me like ranged weapons are simply overpowered as they let you ignore the AI.
I feel like this game falls for the common pitfall of a designer building content, playing it one time to ensure it's beatable (likely with full equipment, and with the omniscience of the game designer), then moving on to the next piece of content. Even if your game is intentionally difficult this is not a good way to design, you have major blind spots for the users first time experience, the pacing of the game and the ways in which it's frustrating.