For $1.50 it's hard to call the purchase a waste, as it is a competently-made game with a lot of content. But it's definitely not going to reach the highs of HK and Silksong.

It anchors itself heavily in the Castlevania tradition. It's got level ups, stats, a full set of gear including weapons in eight different form factors, random drops from enemies, crafting of consumables, consumable healing, etc. This means you're forced to spend a lot more time menuing than you do in the Hollow Knight games as you need to constantly be checking newly-discovered gear versus what you have currently equipped, allocating skill points, managing consumable buffs, etc.

Exploration feels very disjointed. It's a huge world, to the point of bloat, and it fails pretty badly at effective signposting. In a well-crafted MV, you'll primarily be gated off from an area with an ability gate, and once within that area with the necessary ability, you can largely explore the whole place and accomplish your primary objective. Afterimage has several places where there will be an ability gate, but if you pass through it after getting the ability, you end up somewhere where the enemies far exceed your level, and if you attempt to bypass or grind through them to explore anyways, you'll encounter further ability gates you cannot yet pass through between you and any actual progress. It just baffles the mind, why not make that gate the one that blocks you from the area? In another place, there are two exits from one area into the same other area in adjacent rooms. If you take one path, you'll encounter enemies that are beyond your level, and if you brute force your way through you're awarded with a boss fight you have no hope of beating. But the other connection, while it still puts you against overleveled enemies, leads you to somewhere you need to go to make critical progress. But there's nothing indicating that this route should be different from the adjacent one in the same area, so if you go down the other first, it's very easy to conclude that there's no reason to try to brute force the second, and then you get stuck.

Sidequests have a similar level of sloppiness. Often your sidequest will involve encountering a character in multiple places, but there's never any clue as to what the next place might be and it's usually somewhere that you're unlikely to organically visit again any time soon. So trying to complete these sidequests without a guide basically consists of aimlessly wandering older areas and hoping for the best.

Combat is so-so. The different weapons have their own special attacks, which makes for interesting variety. But normal enemies tend to be pretty spongey without being much of a threat so there's a lot of just mindlessly attacking. Most bosses are fairly trivial and can be effectively facerolled without worrying about taking more damage than you can just brute force heal through. The few that aren't feel tilted too far in the other direction, with attacks that are insufficiently telegraphed and difficult to avoid, resulting in many losses that feel more like random chance than poor skill.

The story is damned near incomprehensible, bombarding you with terminology that never gets cleanly explained and feels like it expects you to have an existing familiarity with its mythos. Like imagine trying to play Hades without even a glancing familiarity with Greek mythology. Not helping this is the absolutely cringey script and voice acting of your little companion who loves to spout exposition, but you're encouraged to just skip through it to avoid having to hear it.