Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Hidetaka Miyazaki has the touch of gold, similar to Christopher Nolan or simply the mythological figure Midas; whatever is touched upon during his career, quality is ensured. And with their latest product, more successes are guaranteed.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a major different direction from the past action RPG formula's used. In particular, the RPG has lessened so much that now you will only be able to play as 1 character named Wolf, who has 1 weapon and a handful of skill trees.

The Sengoku era and shinobi based setting enrich the overall presentation, although if you are familiar with Japanese environments from games or other mediums, most of it will look, well, recognizable.

With only a handful of odd enemies to fight, most of the enemy design resolves around fighting other humans. As Wolf, your main weapon is the sword, but uniquely seen here, you also have prosthetic tools available, which most of the time are used in assistance, or for crippling particular enemies.

With the grappling hook tool, Sekiro's level design is as far as traversing goes quite a bit more interesting than say Demon's Souls, Dark Souls or Bloodborne.Unfortunately, on my PS4 Pro, the game would sometimes slow down quite a bit when using this hook. It was fun to move with it though.

The core gameplay resolves not around attacking or dodging, but around parrying and deflecting incoming attacks. There are 2 ways to do this, and the Mizuki variant ensures that you can counter otherwise unblockable attacks, but this usually comes with a high risk, high reward scenario.

What has also been striped down is that multiplayer is entirely absent, which means that there is no way to call for summoning help. The custom character creation is also gone, and you can only really upgrade your vitality, attack, tools and posture, which is the main meter system that encourages parrying.

I have died hundreds of times again, as expected from From Software's caliber, and fortunately, the sweet satisfaction of overcoming the biggest foes remains. Some of the featured bosses are highly difficult and fun, but I managed to finally beat the game today after defeating Sword Saint Isshin, the final boss.

The game also offers stealth options to sometimes instantly kill enemies or simply skip them. The NPC and overall lore are obviously Japanese based, but I wasn't as intrigued by it upon my first playthrough. Perhaps some of those lore experts online will change my mind.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is another strong new IP from From Software, and it's both a critical and commercial success. Although not one of my favorites from them, I still applaud and cherish the time I spent journeying though.

Rating: 8.4