Put an hour or so into this on Game Pass, this game is great. If you like Blasphemous you'll probably dig this.
Nope the devs took too much pride in breaking the player's balls to think about how to make the game fun, if you die 2 or 3 times the game actually gets harder and then you need to waste a valuable currency item to make it not super hard again.
The dumb "You have to fight a doppleganger" every single time you get to a checkpoint gets old, and I've gotten to the first boss and even those few times it's annoying.
Also cheap spikes everywhere to eat up your health sucks too.
It's not even that hard, it's just the emphasis as mentioned previously in this thread of parry and countering that gets really old and annoying fast. Countering doesn't even kill things in 1 hit, you'll have to counter enemies repeatedly if they're bigger.
As also previously mentioned, your spells are taken from the same pool as your healing, and they tell you that SOME ENEMIES are spongey AF if you don't use the spells on them... this just drags out some fights.
The level design is that you'll get locked into small place with a number of enemies, then as your fighting them, more will "SURPRISE"(not a surprise because it constantly happens) drop from the roof.
Your reward for fighting all the same enemies over and over is a souls type resource and that lets you level up ONLY the spells that you'll only rarely use because you'll want to use that pool for healing, the spells are an uninspired "Spike Bolt l Spike Bolt ll Spike Bolt lll and they don't really tell you if any of the levels are more economical. Well there is a shop that you can buy things with those souls too, but the buffs those things give you is usually small. The better buffed items are bought with the resource that gets rid of the red moon.
Blasphemous was hard but it still had fairness and fun.