What level of Early Access would you call this? On a scale of "dev needs more money before the proper launch" to "basically done already and early access as a form of marketing".
It's far more complete than the first game was when it started early access. Their road map says a new area and new weapon aspects are on the way, and some characters and all keepsakes have placeholder art and models. They haven't filled out all of the character relationship aspects of the game yet, but right now there's plenty of content.
The game is complete enough that they're thinking about balance changes and fine-tuning.
The keepsakes having art placeholders confuses me. Why didn't they just reuse the keepsake art from the first one?
They're new items with distinct names. If they reused the old art it would still be a placeholder.
Are they though? I have about 75% of them so far and it's admittedly been a while since I played the first one, but most of them seem to have the same basic effects.