Played this over two nights of insomnia. I really liked it! I liked the school setting, distorting a familiar location, especially one where you're not supposed to be there at that hour. I don't know if I'd call it spooky, but it definitely feels... halloween-y if that makes sense? The idea of being a kid out at night, pointing a flashlight at shadowy figures just feels like a very halloween thing.
The weapons all feel very different from each other and it takes a while to adjust to one and for most of the game I didn't have a definite favorite, going back and forth between them based on what cryptids I was fighting.
And the cryptids are great! I love the light mechanic as it makes you guess as to what cryptid you're going to see next and it does keep you on edge a bit. And each cryptid feels very unique and needed different strategies to take them out effectively. I also love how open the game is, I'm pretty sure I cheesed the backflip to get to areas that would have been much easier to get to a little later in the game and the monsters were much harder than what I was encountering.
Finished the game with 416 cryptids defeated and all pages retrieved. Not sure where the last 4 are, but I think they might be Sneaks that I missed somewhere. The only other thing I didn't get was the thing at the top of the clocktower. I know one character says that at some point you can break spikes, but to my knowledge none of the stuff I picked up allowed me to break them.
My only gripe was the controls. Especially in the beginning it was difficult for me to control the character and even later in the game it wasn't clear to me when my character would face the other direction or just walk backwards. I think I got the hang of it in the end but I still had moments were I thought my character would turn but didn't.
Overall, great game! Had a lot of fun with it.