Agreed about the Dark Souls point, this game definitely has a lot of mechanics it's borrowing from there (the flasks being replenished at your Underlab and your Bones being lost on death). Those aren't Souls-exclusive mechanics, but they were definitely popularized by that series.

I'm also getting some level of Soulslike feel from the combat - I chose the hammer at the start, and the amount of commitment you need for each hammer blow makes you really need to understand what each enemy's movement patterns will be - but I bet that feeling would change if I picked something like the twin daggers.

I personally don't really care about achievements in most games, as they rarely add anything for me. My point is that the devs seem to consider using the modifiers as cheating (plenty of games will disable achievements if you use built in cheats, or detect mods, etc).

Besides most games that have difficulty settings don't disable achievements on lower difficulties, and even then, there are plenty of acheivements in this game that have nothing to do with how "easy" or not the game is overall, and are skill based.

If you're playing on easier mode, why would you want achievements? lol

Modifiers also disable achievements, so not the best argument, as the devs seem to equate it to cheating.

Also the game literally has Dark Souls death, EXP, and checkpoint mechanics, how is it not like Dark Souls?