FROM SOFTWARE'S SEKIRO: SHADOWS DIE TWICE IS ONE OF THE FINEST GAMES IN THEIR CATALOG, BUT IT'S EXCEPTIONALLY DIFFICULT, EVEN BY SOULS GAME STANDARDS.
It was a decade ago when a PlayStation 3 exclusive by the name of Demon’s Souls, complete with ungainly apostrophe, released to minimal fanfare in North American video game stores. A Western-styled third-person action role-playing game with knights in armor and fire-breathing dragons, it was a slow-burner which would snowball a rabid and ecstatically perplexed fanbase, storming forums with advice, rumors, bellyaching diatribes, and madcap theories, confounded by its mesmerizing challenge and mystery and picking apart its puzzles in due course. The energy which fueled those early Souls pilgrims delivered a significantly stronger release event to mark Dark Souls’ release, a game which has since gone down in best-selling infamy, launching the fervent careers of Twitch streamers, podcasters, and YouTube lore-hounds (some might argue it single-handedly popularized the now-ubiquitous game-specific term “lore”), seducing a budding cult-to-mainstream audience which now sets its sore hands on Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
To discuss Sekiro absent of its lineage is practically nonsensical, and to pick apart its exultant reach for a new-yet-familiar experimentation with Souls tropes and expectations without giving ample consideration to those roots is a peculiar undertaking, despite the fact that there inevitably exist approaching players with no awareness of what came before. Players for whom shorthand like “bonfires,” “humanity,” and “bloodstains” — let alone the reverence afforded to maverick series director/auteur Hidetaka Miyazaki — carry no truck whatsoever, something Sekiro seems to anticipate and preempt in its overall novelty.
It is somehow both Souls and “not-Souls,” both mother’s milk to the die-hard horde aching for abuse and a unique offering meant to be met on its own terms by the uninitiated. In certain respects, it’s the most ambitious and accessible Souls game ever made, intentions which push it firmly past the fan service Dark Souls 3 mustered and into a genuine watershed moment in contemporary gaming. If this generation of consoles sits staring wide-eyed at its ember-pocked finale, it’s also the perfect setting for Sekiro to hit the stands as its samurai swan song.
Once again, we call on a franchise history: churchgoers can open their books to the tale of Artorias the Abysswalker, one of the Souls series’ most beloved characters, a knight with one functioning arm steadfastly defending the path of destruction from the unaware, sacrificing himself to save his wolf companion. Similarly, Sekiro’s titular protagonist The Wolf’s arm is completely severed in the playable prologue, then replaced by a maudlin sculptor with the “shinobi prosthetic,” a patchwork mechanical limb which grants him a grappling hook and a variety of hot-swap-ready attachments. Sekiro is more agile than any Souls avatar before him, an able guardian pledged to rescue and protect young Lord Kuro, now mired in a deadly extended battle with the warring Ashina clan and gifted with immortal blood that increasingly seems like a curse.
Souls games have always tussled with themes of immortality, equally intended to inform the story and integrate into gameplay, repeatedly reviving the avatar after defeat to try their hand again and again. While this practical threaded aspect has always factored into the narrative, Sekiro leverages it more thoroughly and even intimately than any other, as Kuro infuses his immortal gift to the main character to empower their task of guardianship, a choice which rouses the wrath of other characters embroiled in the drama. Little by little, the over-arching plot of the game communicates how the power of immortality jockeys attention, bitterness, desperation, and agency between its major players, in a way that feels more thoughtful, concentrated, even classical than previous Souls titles.
We’ll get back to that story shortly, but describing Sekiro’s moment-to-moment gameplay is integral to distinguishing it from other Souls titles and, really, from any other games on the market. The basics require a wholesale investment in its combat, internalizing parry and deflect defense maneuvers and timing for even the lowliest scrubs as a base requirement to succeed. The shinobi prosthetic grants a few feasible sidearms — one may give you a thrusting spear, shuriken, or a flamethrower, as well as more esoteric options like mid-combat teleportation — but the meat and potatoes of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice center on the exact same katana wielded at the start of the game. That sword can deal damage, defend, and turn enemy attacks back on them, but precisely activating its deflect is paramount. A posture gauge continuously fills when your blocks lack that required precision and, though it regenerates in time, a full gauge will leave you completely exposed and staggered to subsequent attacks.
The balance lies in how this sensibility works on both sides, with enemies also beholden to their own posture gauges. Most encounters require a learned understanding of this exchange; in other words, the longer any run-ins with basic enemies take to complete, the arguably worse you’re performing. At the very start of the game and on through its lengthy and savagely challenging finale, enemies are meant to be dispatched quickly, either through head-on duels or stealthy assassinations. Baked into its Souls-informed makeup, Sekiro equally leverages a very deliberate stealth-kill genre play-style, invoking equal portions of the Tenchu series and sacrosanct PlayStation 1 classic Bushido Blade; the former is closely echoed when hugging the walls plotting your next kill, and the latter’s one-hit deaths and injuries seem pertinent to Sekiro’s fiercest duels.
While it’s not necessarily reaching for something like Metal Gear Solid, a remarkable portion of the game all but requires careful herd-thinning via those stealth kills. In this respect, Sekiro staggers slightly, with enemy aggro behavior never quite as brilliantly realized as its sword-clashing combat, and group fights are all but untenable (in this way it is quite similar to other Souls games). Projectile-based enemies in particular don’t seem to operate on the same level as the rest, either doggedly marking you from outlandish distances or quick to ignore after hiding behind a wall for a moment. Additionally, the recognizable magic of stealth gameplay is slightly dispelled with enemy AI usually disinterested in investigating dead confederates, which makes things easier at the expense of nuanced behavior that gamers will have grown to expect in the genre.
These quibbles are absolutely minor in the face of Sekiro’s numerous strengths. For one, the level design is predictably mesmerizing, with both serpentine interconnected areas stuffed to the brim with dangers and massive gasp-inducing open spaces, inviting players to enter skirmishes from multiple angles of approach. There are secrets, and cryptic tucked-away NPCs, and navigational tricks and shortcuts to hasten movement through different areas. The grappling hook mechanics are precise and exhilarating, allowing players to rocket through snowy mountainside cliffs and sometimes even escape difficult scraps to reassess; later enemies are able to chase you up to grapple points, a profanity-inducing terror at first blush.
Sekiro’s story takes place during that unique twilight between the seasons of fall and winter, a unique visual concept which adds delightful and distinct flourishes to each area, helping to distinguish its most common imagery — namely historic Japanese pagodas, rooftops, castles, and battlements during the Sengoku period — adding an underlying supernaturally distinct flair. Those fantastical qualities are metered out in greater measure as the game progresses, somewhat reminiscent of Bloodborne’s controlled burn of cosmic horror, but here it seems to muster the more magical imagery of the Ukiyo-e art movement.
Through and through, Miyazaki’s meticulous attention seems to autograph each molecule and grant it all a greater meaning. The FromSoftware team’s return to Japanese folkloric imagery and historic iconography (formerly explored in games like Kuon for the PlayStation 2 and the criminally-underappreciated Otogi series for the Xbox) borders on the ecstatic, and is a far cry from the settings explored in their output of recent years. With their Souls games, Western RPG tropes were rearranged, even deconstructed and drained of their heroic virtuousness, focusing on themes of tragedy and hubris, solemnity instead of bravado. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, on the other hand, feels more distinctly proud and earnest, giving the journey stakes that feel more personal, vibrantly realized, and cinematically related to the Japanese tradition of chanbara and period dramas.