So this is out!
Really enjoying it so far. My first hot take is that it's a massively upgraded Tenchu infused with Dark Souls design principles.
It's Tenchu in that you have a lot of different tools at your disposal, and levels are fairly open and allow you to, if you're patient enough, stealth kill most enemies rather than fight them outright. You can usually run and hide and come back if things aren't going your way too. The combat vaguely reminds me of it, but dosed with a fair amount of Dark Souls-esqe timing and emphasis on dodging and blocking.
So far it's giving me that "if you die it's your fault" vibe, sorta like Dark Souls except with even fewer excuses for being dead because you're so much more mobile than your opponents. Fights seem easy and sometimes are, against the little guys. Smack, smack, smack, their posture breaks, sync kill. But then you'll not have the initiative or get stuck on terrain or be fighting in a suboptimal place and get wrekt all of the sudden. Multiple enemies at once is very spicy, archers are the fucking devil and there feels like a lot of potential depth to how good you could get at the game, when you combine all the combat techniques like deflects and counters, all the various tools, all the unlockable skills....like I said, Tenchu with a massive RPG and combat upgrade.
Levels are organized in a souls-style way. Hub, bonfires, enemies respawning, large in size, lots of exploration, weird NPCs doing saying weird things and giving you stuff.
The game feels tougher in some ways than Dark Souls, I think. It's possible to aggro a whole shit load of guys at once, and a single guy can take a fair amount of individual attention to kill since the will block you more often than not. So you often have too much to deal with when 4 guys are overlapping their attacks and rushing you constantly. I've died a lot so far getting in too deep with too many opponents and it was all la di da until:
I GAVE EVERYONE THE CANCER.
So I'm trying to play more carefully now, take my time, retreat and even bonfire if I need to.
I'm enjoying all the variety of enemies so far, including classic staples like "Packs of Dogs" and "Guy with Torch." The first samurai mini-boss was a lot of fun to fight.
Not sure I'm completely sold on combat atm. There's...a lot going on. And they have special counter moves to do against unblockable sweep and thrust attacks. Which basically asks you to do several kinds of predictive parries versus Dark Souls essentially one. Not sure how much I'm going to make use of that. Unless the same guy has really been kicking the shit out of you, I don't know how you're supposed to really learn and study their moves. The telegraph between an unblockable thrust or sweep seems difficult to tell, because you both have to do that, then get the timing on the parry as well.
The story is....japanese. Ninjas, samurai, lords, ladies, spoopy stuff, dragon stuff. Just sort of taking it in atm. In some ways the story and dialog is very blunt and straightforward for From, in others it feels like it's trying to be just as obscure or obtuse as Dark Souls often was. Seems like Activision was like "Please have characters properly explain core mechanics through the story." And yet there's still plenty deliberately obtuse stuff like Buff Icons without any explanation what they mean.
Anyways, it's definitely got the From Software stuff going on, and it's good.