Look, this is a good bit of DLC, but I already complained how the base game was starting to feel far too over-familiar to me as someone who has played the first two games, and this expansion consists of one area that is blatantly a parallel to the Painted World from the first game, and if I'm honest, I don't understand why. It's not like the story of this expansion absolutely required the setting to be waving member berries in your face, it really could have teleported you to an entirely new world to do everything it does here.
While we're talking about the story, it's pretty disappointing too. It's more of a prelude to The Ringed City, and other than that one character you meet that serves as the link into that expansion, the story doesn't go much further than "the ruler here is evil, stop her". There is some mystery behind what exactly is happening, but by the time you figure it out, it becomes a very "that's it?" affair.
While the area you explore is a lot like what you'll find in the base game (lacking in concept but still well designed), there really isn't much of it and the only part of it that really stuck out to me is a little village section, while the rest is comprised mostly of snowy paths and fields with the occasional mildly interesting building planted here and there.
The new equipment and spells you can find are pretty cool (I didn't use many of them, going mostly off of the descriptions here), and as for the new bosses, while having only two is a bit of a downer and one of them is painfully average, the other is honest to god top 10 across the whole series material.
So in the end, this feels very similar to how most of what I enjoyed about the main game being summed up with "it's more Dark Souls", but even more so. So, like with the main game itself, if you want more Dark Souls, then go nuts, just don't expect too much of it.
