Dolmen

I'm not willing to play every single, somewhat interesting-looking, third person soulslike action roleplaying game ever made -- not quite. There is a bar of quality and production value the games has to pass. But... the bar is pretty low: Dolmen passed it. It was developed by a small Brazilian team called Massive Work Studio -- who have disbanded now, I believe.

Simple and uninspired soulslike

Dolmen is another scifi-themed take on the genre. It was crafted with far less skill than The Surge; I think Hellpoint would probably be a closer point of comparison in terms of gameplay feel. In terms of ambition, Dolmen falls far below Hellpoint too. Frankly, the game is pretty damn basic.

The story premise has already started fading from my mind -- not that it matters -- but it has something to do with dolmen crystals that are found on the planet Revion Prime to where you arrive to figure out the situation. I also don't know what exactly happened in the ending cinematic of the game but you do survive so I guess a victory? It includes a hilariously optimistic tease for a co-op sequel as well.

Melee not worth it

The small player base that once existed, recommends going for a gun build for the easiest time: enough increases to Energy to equip the tier 3 version of the second human tech armor, enough Skill to use the best guns, and then dump everything else to Science for increased damage -- and maybe some to Constitution to avoid one-shot deaths. With enough human tech equipped, you will have the final human tech perk that grants you a cheat-death passive.

I decided to go melee instead which was not smart. For regular mobs melee is fine but the majority of the bosses don't really support melee combat. For instance, how the game has a perfect block mechanic but then the bosses use almost nothing but attacks that can't be perfectly blocked. You barely have enough time to get a hit in between all the avoiding you have to do and stamina also replenishes very slowly. Hanging back while shooting is so much safer and simpler, and the Science gun build has the best synergy in everything. My build ended up all over the place but guns is what I largely used -- just not as efficiently as one could.

Most guns have technically infinite ammunition as they use your replenishing energy. A heavy shot usually burns energy bar more permanently until a battery is used. Healing also burns energy. As a slight twist for the genre, healing is instantaneous and can be activated in the middle of any animation -- the long use animation happens with batteries instead.

The hardest boss for me was Lobodja -- which is kind of ironic as she would also be the easiest to exploit. I had even watched -- and forgotten -- Oboeshoes's "in-depth guide" video (essentially just a heavily cut playthrough) he made a month or so ago.

DOLMEN

In the video, Oboeshoes also half-jokingly laments how he can't buy the figurine of the Queen Caniptei because they won't ship it to him in the States -- the store being based in Germany or something. That story got an update just today: Plaion (whose division the game's publisher Prime Matter has been) had heard of Oboeshoes's distress and they actually sent him the figurine. He has run his Dolmen joke to the ground yet it keeps going.

Dolmen was fairly easy to 100%. The biggest hurdles are the three achievements for crafting every weapon and armor in the game. I feel I might've gotten somewhat lucky with the random material drops while I was farming mats for my choice of tier 3 armor: I didn't need to do any further farming after that.

Crafting all weapons includes boss weapons. And to get those, you have to kill every boss in the game thrice in total -- which is dumb and unnecessary even if the bosses are considerably easier once you've beaten them once. To respawn a boss, you need nanites (the game's version of souls) and dolmen fragments. The nanites didn't seem to get spent even on a failed attempt and the dolmen fragments are plenty enough. The fragments used to be required for summoning a co-op partner as well but the cost was removed -- probably due to there being no players in the first place.