How does it compare to Metroid and ‘Vania? I’ve also heard it’s Souls-like for I’m guessing difficulty?
It's not especially difficult, except for some totally optional colosseum fights and boss rushes.
It's Souls-like in that when you die you show up at the last checkpoint you activated with your MP halved and currency gone, and you get one shot at getting everything back by killing a shade that lingers around the place where you die. Fortunately it tends to spawn at the entrance of rooms, and outside boss rooms too. There's some trial and error platforming but nothing that will kill you instantly like in Blasphemous. One of the optional areas is a Super Meat Boy style gauntlet, but otherwise nothing too frustrating.
As for progression, I found it way more labyrinthine than the usual Souls loop, and more reliant on learning new abilities than unlocking shortcuts (thought there's some of that too). Once you're done with the first few areas the world opens up an impressive amount and you can go a long way before hitting any ability-gating. This also means tons of backtracking. Even once you've unlocked every fast travel station as well as the ability to warp to a specific point you marked down (it's one way and you can only have one at a time) you'll still be doing TONS of backtracking just for the exploration or revisiting places you think you can now take on. Probably the worst thing I can say about the game, not that I mind it too much (I actually like getting lost in these things).
The abilities themselves are your usual run of the mill dash/double-jump/wall jump/variation of flight, and the combat evolves with some basic charge attacks. The charms you can equip for a variety of effects I found to add more versatility to the gameplay in general, especially for challenge fights. Usually I don't even tinker with ability loadouts and just stick to what works in general, but here I found pretty useful to experiment around.
Special time of day?
