Nose is almost the platonic ideal of the soulslike. It has pretty much everything you'd expect from such a game: enemies that are significantly tougher than you, gates that are locked from the other side, a universal resource that's gained from killing enemies that serves as both currency and experience points, elevators with big buttons you have to step on to activte, a big poisonous swamp, and so on.
So closely does it adhere to the formula that it's almost difficult to describe without just describing soulslikes as a concept. I guess the best I can do is to note the ways in which it differs from the formula. Mechanically, there's not much new on offer here. It's a fir bit easier than the actual Dark Souls games and even Bloodborne, but it's not as easy as the likes of Code Vein. I think the biggest difference between Nose and its genremates mechancally is that when you're killed, instead of dropping all of your Keana (the aforementioned resource), and having to go and reclaim it, you just respawn having lost half of what you had. It doesn't seem like a big difference at first, but if you had a lot of Keana before dying, you might respawn with enough to level up a couple of times, making your next attempt very slightly easier than the last one.
It's aesthetically and thematically where Nose really makes its mark, though. It might just be because I'm playing it on the lowest settings (and my laptop still feels like it's going to burn a hole in my leg!), but it's got a very cute low polygon count look to it that makes it feel like what would have happened if a soulslike had been released on the Dreamcast (and if Dreamcast games had significantly longer draw distances). Thematically, it's kind of weird. There's people sitting around being sad, like in a normal soulslike, but there's also the whole "nose" aspect to the world.
It seems like the main god of the world is named Nose, and as you go around, you'll sometimes see giant noses carved from stone or sculpted in metal. The bonfire equivalents are well-like structures decorated with noses. There's a building called The Temple of Nose housing living statues and an angry drunk giant, and an early boss you fight is a giant black nose that scutters around on tentacles called Nose Hair Demon. I haven't completed the game yet, but I really hope there's some kind of explanation for all this at the end of it. or maybe I don't? Maybe it's better for a weird game to just be weird?
I definitely recommend playing Nose. It's a very fun game, with a perfectly pitched level of difficulty (in my opinion, at least), and it's also free! And don't worry about the computer thing, my laptop is old and preowned, so people who prioritise being able to play high-spec PC games should have no trouble at all on running it on its highest settings.
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