It works on a daily rotation a bit like a Persona-lite.

So in the morning you choose one of four different areas with a unique biome and different spells/abilities specific to them to go to for that day. They’re small, dense open world areas with some hidden loot chests, NPCs to chat to mostly for worldbuilding but occassionally giving you story questions (that you usually resolve by just continuing to play over time), and occassional batches of enemies. They also contain portals to dungeons of different difficulties (clearly marked like ski slopes would be at a Ski Resort, which is kind of a theme of the game about dungeon crawling as tourism). They’re not sprawling and even then certain areas leading to the higher level dungeons are blocked off at first until you progress. Just enough to explore a little bit and test out your (usually pretty cool) abilities that are specific to that biome.

(There are also spots in these areas where you can choose not to do a dungeon and just relax and admire the veiws for an afternoon for a boost to stats etc. It encourages you to sort of roleplay the vibe of being on holiday in that way, but it can also be useful if you’re struggling as doing this gives bonuses like growing your health bar permanently etc).

Then you pick a dungeon in that world to tackle. You can only do one a day. These a tight, often smartly overlapping, self-contained levels that are always a mixture of fighting groups of monsters and approachable (but not braindead) puzzles, sometimes with a bit of light platforming. They range from being puzzle heavy to enemy heavy, but they’re all a mixture. Some of them are pretty direct homages to classic games too, so they might change perspective to evoque those games and make them easier or cooler to navigate. For example:

spoiler

There’s a Mario Galaxy one of small spherical worlds with their own gravity that you also snowboard grind rails between. Or a Fez style one where you use levers to rotate whole bits of the level. One with minecart racing etc.

The combat is pretty standard hack and slash - heavy or light attacks, short four hit combos etc - with a dodge roll based on stamina. I’m not great at that stuff but it’s not punishing unless you play on the highest difficulty and things like stamina for dodges refill very quickly. It’s made more engaging by your spells/abilities for that region though which are always one close, one ranged, but vary from being purely offensive to movement based. Then you also have things called conduit attacks that recharge (and you can find more of and swap in and out as you please) that are things like big AOE attacks, things that strip sheilds from bigger enemies and stagger the others etc. If it sounds like a lot at once it doesn’t feel that way, because everything in the game is introduced gradually and unfolds in a really friendly and managable way. There’s no anytime saving in dungeons like there is in the rest of the game, but they usually have a couple of well placed checkpoints and the dungeons themselves aren’t long.

Once you’ve finished a puzzle you go back to the resort town for the evening. There you can sell, buy, or upgrade gear or just wander round to talk to NPCs and occassionally stumble on small character quests. The main thing you do each evening is decide how you’re going to spend it - picking one of the 15 or so story characters to ‘hang out’ with or do an activity. Different characters improve different stats you have and befriending people unlocks abilities and rewards specificly from them. Pretty much everything is useful though so you don’t have to feel like you’re making tough choices or trying to max stats. I just went for whatever vibe I was feeling unless there was a specific thing I wanted. Sometimes I wanted to unlock upgrades for my weapons, sometimes just to chill with a dog. Very occassionally there’s some sort of story beat where you don’t get a choice of what to do with your evening, ranging from dramatic plot points to village events (a bit like the festivals in Stardew Valley or similar).

Then you go back to your hotel room at night and can either go to bed to start the next day with full health, or stay up reading or watching TV to advance your stats but take a hit to your overall health the next day as you’re ‘tired’.

And the days cycle through like that. There doesn’t seem to be a limit on how many days in which you have to complete all the dungeons either so you can try and beat one every day or take it slower and see more of the character stuff by resting some days just to get to the evening.