Beat the game. I'd give it a 7/10. Obviously spoilers.

This is going to be a long one. No, I will not be providing a TL:DR.

So, having beaten the game, there are some things the game did right and some things the game did VERY wrong, that led to me not enjoying it as much as I'd hoped I would. It's very well worth the price, only someone truly insane would say otherwise, but certain decisions the developers made dragged the game down a lot.

Now, onto specifics. I'm going to start with the negatives to get them out of the way.

CURRENCY AND PRICES: Compared to the first game, the things available to buy in this game are OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive. This is such a huge problem due to the fact that only a small subset of enemies drops the currency instead of all enemies like in the first game. This currency is very difficult to farm at a rate faster than you have to spend it, due to the vast majority of the game's benches forcing you to pay for them to unlock them (and there are even some cheeky ones that force you to pay EVERY time you want to use them), in addition to the bell stations and other things, some of which don't actually have a practical use and are literally just tricks to get you to effectively lose some rosaries for nothing.

I've literally beaten the game, including being stuck for an entire day making almost no progress because I missed ONE hallway (more on that in a bit), so I had loads of time to accumulate more rosaries, and I STILL am looking at probably 3,000 or more rosaries I have to use to finish buying stuff from the various merchants. There is absolutely no way the developers expect the player to be able to buy even half of the game's available upgrades and items before defeating the final boss and rendering the point of getting those items moot. I almost never lost any rosaries from repeated deaths either, I'd estimate I maybe lost 600 in total and that's high-balling it. Bosses also rarely drop anything after you defeat them, which is from what I remember very different from the previous game.

HEALTH, HEALING, AND DAMAGE: This game's difficulty is completely obscene compared to the first game. One major culprit for this is the majority of enemies in the game (including EVERY boss) being able to do 2 damage at a time. I would even wager that the number of enemies with at least one 2-damage attack actually far outnumber the enemies that do not. Mask shards are also MUCH harder to get in this game, I didn't have my first extra mask until I was nearly finished.

This would be bad enough on its own, but then we get into the obnoxious changes the developers made to healing in this game. Not only do you get the resource for healing far slower, healing takes far longer, even with the blue upgrade that can speed it up. And, bonus points, as if that wasn't malicious enough, they also made it so that you get Critically Hit and lose ALL silk if you get hit while healing. I don't know what evil spirit possessed them to make them think this was a good idea. The only small bit of mercy we get for all of these new problems is that we can heal in the air. Yay. That doesn't even start on the issue of one of your navigation tools, the ring-based one, taking your silk when used.

Enemies also have a crazy high amount of health across the board. The only enemies that die in 4 or less hits are the ones in the first couple of areas in the game, and then from that point onward, you have to hit even the smallest enemies 5 or more times to get rid of them until you can complete a very lategame quest to upgrade your needle a second time, and upgrading a third time is UNGODLY hard, with a quest that is literally the near-universally-hated White Flower quest on steroids.

This health issue isn't the only reason enemies are so much harder to kill. The developers have made so many enemies capable of parrying your attack during certain moves so you can't actually hit them with your needle. At least in the first game, very few enemies could do this, and I believe even when they were doing their own blade moves, you could still hit them from certain angles. This game made it so that many enemies just 360 bladebox and some of them do it frequently. This slows down the game a ton, and many enemies that don't do this are coded to constantly fly away out of your reach and are in areas with hazards all over the place so you can't chase them down effectively, AND many of them have projectiles.

On top of all of that, hazards in this game also now deal two masks of damage as often as they deal one. This game is much closer to Ori games in terms of hazards being crazy punishing. One hit to an enemy into a two-mask hazard and you're one-hit to the next hazard or even next enemy hit from full health unless you have 6 or more masks, which doesn't happen until quite late into the game.

THE MAP, NAVIGATION AND MOVESET: While Hornet is capable of sprinting through the map faster than the Knight could (unless it's a straightaway he could crystal dash through), but that doesn't really matter when the map is so much larger, typically more congested with much harder hazards and enemies, and roughly every 6th room has a locked/opens-on-the-other-side door or ceiling/hole in the floor.

The benches are also very far apart, so if you are trying to comb places looking for things you missed before or retreading with new moves, you have to spend 10-15 minutes sometimes just to get to somewhere even from the nearest fast-travel spot, which of course also means it's going to be that long coming back too. This is also a massive problem for some bosses, the runbacks for many bosses is several minutes long even if you navigate perfectly and don't stop for any enemies.

As for Hornet's basic moveset (not including tools and silk attack): I don't like it at all and consider it a unanimous downgrade from the Knight's. Hornet is twice as tall as the Knight is, but seems like she has the same range as default Knight with no way I've found to increase it. You have to practically ram your forehead into enemies to hit them with your needle compared to the Knight, and her Hunter crest down-air attack is god-awful. The Beast and Wanderer Crests are so terrible I didn't even bother attempting to use them once I found out what they did. I spent the whole game wearing the Reaper Crest, which solved the down-air problem, but in exchange all of the other needle swings are wonky, narrow, quite hard to hit things with, and slower than default.

If there was a button I could push (or a crest I could wear) that would throw all of Hornet's stuff except sprinting out the window and just let me play as the Knight again with my old badge set, I'd smash the button so hard I'd break my hand. In my opinion Team Cherry utterly failed to make Hornet feel good to use as a sequel/replacement character for the Knight. She has lots of new options for attacks, but they take resources that you will constantly be out of if you actually use the tools with any regularity. I spent the entire game almost never using tools except in boss fights that were hard-walling me because I didn't want to run out of shell parts.

Navigation in this game is excessively tedious. One part of this is due to the aforementioned spacing of benches and bell stations, but it's also a big issue with visibility and map density. As an example, I could not for the life of me figure out what I was doing wrong for the better part of a day while trying to get to two of the melodies at the end of the game. This is because I missed ONE SMALL NONDESCRIPT HALLWAY in the cogwork area because it's so easily missable on one side of a busy downchute that has a bunch of enemies and hazard gears dotting the middle and right side where that hallway is. This ONE hallway is the ONLY way to get to two mandatory clear conditions for the main quest, which is absolutely insane.

This single mishap completely soured my experience with the back half of my time with the game before the first clear, which some might write off as being unlucky, but in my opinion it speaks to just how many locked doors and go-the-long-way-around paths this game has that it caused me to miss this for so long. I spent hours fast-travelling around everywhere trying to find another movement skill to use to jump out of the top of the final elevator room because my map was telling me one of the melodies was up there (and at this point I didn't have the other clockwork melody either), with it not occurring to me that I had to go down first to go up via a sub-doorway.

Now on to what I think the game did well:

BOSSES: The bosses in this game do a good job of challenging you and rewarding you for learning how to fight them. It always feels like you've grown more skilled as a player after beating one. Several of the bosses are quite cool too. My personal favorite is the Clockwork Dancers. I've never seen two men doing ballet poses and hugging each other and thought it was awesome before this, and never will again, but I thought the entire package of this boss fight was phenomenal in terms of the music, the comedy, and the eventual reveal of who built them and why (I didn't find out from the Green Prince until after I'd already beaten them, so I hopefully didn't miss the Green Prince jumping in to help me during the fight, I'll be so mad).

I will say the final boss was a cakewalk compared to the boss before it though, I only died to the final boss a single time and died to Lace before it for around 20 minutes. I attribute this to one of the upgrades I was using, which I won't say here so that everyone else can complete their own journey their way. I literally died to almost every other boss in the game more times than I died to the final boss, which is kind of hilarious, actually. I wish there was a way to see how many times you died to each boss, mine would look absurd.

MUSIC AND ART: The game's soundtrack is, to absolutely nobody's surprise, exceptional. I anticipate I'll be listening to a lot of it while doing other things later once I can get the tracks.

For the art, the game of course looks great. Barring a few visibility issues, you couldn't ask for a better-looking game for 20 USD.

So that's it. That's all I can think of that's worth saying. It looks like a very negative-stacked review, but that's because there just aren't as many ways to speak positively about good music and art or about bosses without doing a deep dive on every single one, which my fingers can't handle.