It’s very Souls-inspired, but (as someone who has played a good number of souls games) it’s done fairly poorly. It’s still far more interactive than TES games, but it’s clunky. It’s not bad, just bad compared to the Souls games, which are particularly good, but the rest of the game is quite different from a souls game. It’s basically if you take the bonfires and combat system from a souls game and stick it in a narrative focused RPG.

Somewhat similar to Skyrim combat with the addition of parrying, dodging, and quick-swap hotkey consumables like potions, throwable potions (called splashes), throwing knives, food, and weapon oils (flame, frost, poison). I think magic combat is much better than Skyrim. Spells have light and heavy attack options, and you can wield any combination of spells and weapons (other than if you have a 2 handed weapon). You can have up to 4 sets of magic and/or weapons in your inventory slots to quickly swap between. Stealth combat is more difficult than Skyrim. Sneaking close to enemies requires more situational awareness, and the stealth skills aren’t as overpowered as Skyrim.

A bit absurd, in my limited experience. I did a bow with a one-handed rapier-like sword and a parrying dagger in my one playthrough so far. The bow was irritating to aim and arrow flight seems weirdly inconsistent on distance, but when it lands it’s about as overpowered as sneak archery in Skyrim.

The parrying is similarly strong — enemies could kill me if I wasn’t paying attention, but you can parry the majority of attacks, including things that seem impossible, like parrying a bear biting you, and the parrying dagger’s window is overly forgiving and overly spammable to the point that I had to stop myself from using it sometimes. I think parrying with other weapons is less silly, but I didn’t mess with them enough.

I also didn’t try the magic, so someone else can pick that part up, but it looked pretty extensive.

On hard difficulty, it feels like soulslike / tes mixup. The combat is dynamic and most enemies of your level would hit hard, but blocks, dodges and dashes are there.

But on the other hand, more things can be improved with gear and level to absurd proportions, like improve iframes on dodge or extend parry window to like more than half a sec.

In addition to what everyone else said, the summons are pretty cool, as well. You can summon multiples of a creature as well as direct them all to attack a specific enemy if there’s one fucker in a group that needs a jumping, and you can consume your summoned creatures to regain mana (or health, it’s been a while since I played last and I can’t remember exactly.)

There’s also a spell that causes targets to explode into cheese. And it works on your summons. So, infinite cheese is neat, I suppose