But the game is exceptionally punishing to play this way. It's possible to fight these enemies in a standard, more careful style, dodging and getting your licks in when you can. You are alone, with nothing but your strength and an unyielding oath, and you will not stop until your master is safe. With that power comes a dogged determination: to save your master from the enemies who have taken him. With that power, you can never permanently die, and each death comes with a chance to immediately rise up at least once more to try again. You play as Wolf, a shinobi endowed with supernatural powers from his master, a young boy whose blood can resurrect the dead. Sekiro is a game designed around the feeling you have right before the big confrontation-the moment when only the hero and villain remain, sizing each other up, preparing. Sekiro, then, is an answer to a design problem: How do you get players to play aggressively, to take risks, even when the challenge is as intense as possible? The answer, of course, is to give them no other choice. The higher the challenge presented, the more careful players will be. To put it simply, Dark Souls and Bloodborne showed that, given the opportunity, most players will play things as safe as possible, waiting for openings to attack their opponents. Sekiro is decidedly not a Dark Souls game-that needs to be said at the outset-but it does feel in dialog with From's earlier action games and seems to build off of the knowledge about players learned from those games to craft a more tonally controlled challenge. In Sekiro's feudal Japan, you fight because fighting is the only-the only-way forward.įor developers From Software, who have spent much of their recent history designing games that reward avoiding enemies, that encourage never, ever getting hit by an opponent's attack, this is a distinctive adjustment. They're won through relentless, decisive action. Fights in Sekiro, the big, hard fights, aren't won by hiding, or dodging, or trickery. Beating them requires tenacity and a willingness to be direct.

Much of its runtime is spent in a series of unforgiving and tightly designed boss fights, forcing you into face-off after face-off against a small army of champions, monsters, and tragic heroes who want you dead. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a game about the drama of confrontation.

Sekiro shadows die twice wolf