This has some of the vibes of Dark Messiah/Sir Kicksalot: Run up to dudes, give 'em a big ol' kick, launch them like 10 meters. Maybe kick them into spikes off cliffs so you can have your own "THIS IS SPARTA!" moment. Except rats. Rats are grounded to the ground like a Corolla.
Your dude has the stamina of a teenaged boy's first go in bed. If you spend points improving that, you've hamstrung yourself on using the best weapons available, as you really need to spend quite narrowly to make use of the best kit around.
Look, I like, for weird reasons, the whole Dark Messiah/Sir Kicksalot genre. It's kind of like an Elder Scrolls game stripped of all the meandering and most of the quest cruft, leaving you to roam around maps and dispatch foes as whims dictate. But no matter which way you choose, your kick is enormously overpowered, is your means of one-shotting fools, involving environmental hazards.
That said, some playstyles aren't viable. Stealth works, but the majority of your XP comes from killin' and there's not much backstab damage to speak of in this game, so it's more like stealth karate where I wound up kicking guys over, getting in a few quick stabs, catching my breath, repeating. Works fine 'til there's multiple enemies. Straight-up brawlin' works better, fewer stabs required, as kicky as ever. More survivable if there's multiple melee guys, still a hassle if there's ranged opponents. Thankfully that's rare.
Magic makes this all irrelevant once you get a suitably blasty spell and it's not really hard to find. I think once I ran out of oomph and there was one foe left, so... I kicked him over. Counted to three. Magic blast. Problem solved.
And all that's a longwinded way of saying what skills you buy into also set the game's difficulty, though "tedium" is better, because you can easily run away and disengage from most any fight, the enemies are not given over to much pursuit. The only real hazards are weird fishmen with a paralyzing roar and ranged opponents.
For all that talk of combat, most of my time was spent meandering through mazes, finding a lever that opened a shortcut to another part of the maze.
Enemies don't respawn, so once you've flushed out an area the game is more of a "Hunt the Lever Through These Dusty Halls" the game. It's more of a maze-and-navigation problem.
There's more than a few issues with the UI, some serious ones (do not get me started on maps).
The game is really short on hints or navigational clues. It gets a little better as you go forward, but the earlier stuff is really rough. The "octagonal key" puzzle being a massive case in point, for me.
But the game itself is kind of fun in a weird way. It's clearly a labour of love. I have more issues with it than I did with the shonky work my workplace colleague used to produce. And something like 15 hours of playtime was me forgetting to turn this game off, and another dozen hours spent playing suboptimal styles, spending ages at it.