Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

FromSoftware’s distinctive approach to modern action games reached a cultural apex with Dark Souls. A pair of sequels and Bloodborne offered improvements, but neither blazed the same trails nor reached the level cultural cachet attained by FromSoftware’s second Souls title. “It’s like Dark Souls but” and “The Dark Souls of” are reference points for the magnitude of influence spread across subsequent independent and AAA releases. Nothing will rival its mindshare. This isn’t fair but neither is anything (except, obviously, Dark Souls).

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is FromSoftware’s latest and most radical attempt at defining an action game. Like a music producer obsessed with finding a beat, it is built from a process of reflecting on past success, learning from uneven mistakes, and observing time’s effect on the adjacent discourse. Sekiro is iterative but not especially derivative of Dark Souls. It holds on to as many tenets as it either remodels or casts away. Instead of a wide open, stats-obsessed descent into Victorian gothic or fantasy horror, Sekiro is a trim and direct passage to a Sengoku-era ninja legend. It has as much in common with Dark Souls as it does Bushido Blade, Tenchu, and even Punch-Out!!. Even the tiniest shift in perspective reveals an entirely new way of viewing a shared objective.

Instead of an anonymous soul, Sekiro opens with a tangible character. Sekiro, also known as the one-armed wolf, acts as a shinobi in the service of the Divine Heir, Kuro, in 16th century Japan. True to Sekiro’s title, Kuro grants his protector the privilege of the Divine Heir; he can’t die. Naturally, this leads to a volume of larger problems, notably rival factions and warlords who seek that same immortality. What follows is a careful and clearly stated meditation on the perils of eternal life and the inevitable corruption left by its tantalizing opportunity. A more focused and direct narrative may be uncharacteristic of a modern FromSoftware game but it doesn’t leave behind the sinister nuance or world-defining ephemera that characterized their past work. Sekiro enjoys its focus as much as its distance.

Sekiro’s general organization remains on-model. A static sword and a series of sub-weapons, called Prosthetic Tools, are devices for interaction. Contained but open environments are filled with respawning fixed-positioned enemies, loot deposits, obscure merchants, and out-of-the-way secrets. Sculptor Idols provide rest, refresh, and respawning throughout every level. Shinobi hunters and gargantuan opponents fill the role of mini-bosses and sanctioned, narrative-unraveling bosses, respectively. Sekiro flows down a linear path, but usually makes more than one space available to the player. Right until the very end, there was always somewhere else I could go if the current path proved too frustrating.

Progression, too, follows a familiar pattern. Slain enemies fill a bright blue meter and build into Skill Points. Sen, Sekiro’s currency for merchants and upgrades, can be absorbed from their corpse. While Skill Points accumulate into untouchable levels (to be spent on Skill upgrades), all current Skill Points in the bar and all of your liquid Sen are halved upon death. There are ways around both of these penalties, although, even in its harshest moments, failure in Sekiro never felt as numbing and demoralizing as a misstep in a Souls game.

The remainder of Sekiro is a divergence from expected norms. A grappling hook that can latch onto fixed points adds an element of verticality to every environment. Death is no longer the end; the player can either choose to respawn, once, and continue the fight or madly retreat to safety. Leveling up doesn’t generate points to feed into a dozen stats, but creates Skill Points to allot into a handful of active and passive abilities. Instead of shuffling through weapons, a single sword is maintained throughout all of Sekiro. These decisions may sound alarming, but they’re all in service to the sense of progression Sekiro attempts to orchestrate. Once it’s all sorted, processed, and internalized, the eventual thrill of victory remains intact.

Posture is Sekiro’s central character. While combat remains a basic contest of deliberate attacks and health bar management, Posture replaces the Stamina Meter as a parallel component. All enemy attacks, except unblockable attacks signified by red kanji flashed in the center of the screen, can be absorbed by holding the block button. Blocking will increase your Posture meter, eventually leading to a state of paralyzed vulnerability. Blocking at the exact moments of an opponent’s attack makes contact creates a parry, which increases the opponent’s Posture meter and avoids (some) damage to your own. Once Posture is broken, the player can perform a Deathblow and eliminate the enemy regardless of their present vitality.

Sekiro’s use of Posture feels like something FromSoftware has been inching toward since the public reaction to Demon’s Souls. If Bloodborne was a response to Dark Souls players finding safety and comfort in armor, shields, and brute-force, Sekiro’s Posture is renewed attempt to eliminate familiar senses of security. Offense and defense are both measures of the exact same weapon rather than separate pieces of equipment. Even though offense and defense are assigned to different buttons, both are part of the same utility. Endless circling around an enemy, dodge-rolling at precise moments searching for invincibility frames, and power-leveling your way through the game are no longer valid means of progression. Sekiro’s Posture mechanic is built to keep the player active and engaged in the foundations of its combat.

Once combat basics are mastered—in no small part thanks to Hanbai the Undying, a tragic comedy of a training buddy—Sekiro finds its rhythm. I mean this literally, as memorizing attack patterns and responding appropriately becomes a timed, predictable performance. The response to an opponent delivering two quick hits before delaying slightly for the third transitions to an automated process inside of your brain. With every enemy, either a boss or some hapless dipshit out in the field, I have to “know” them before I can take them apart. This was a struggle until I realized what was happening; I was learning without knowing I was learning. With practice I internalized everyone’s moves and then responded appropriately.

Sekiro is quick to introduce complications to its combat. A sweeping unblockable attack demands the response of a straight vertical jump. To capitalize on the evasion, you can then jump on your opponent’s head and dish out quick swipes while they’re stunned. To deal with unblockable thrust attacks, the Mikiri Counter (a very early Skill that has to be unlocked) can be performed by pressing the dodge button in place of the block button. This results in Sekiro grabbing the spear and stomping on it, which creates instant Deathblow opportunities in weak opponents and major Posture damage in larger ones. Dealing with unblockables makes aspects of Sekiro analogous to Punch-Out!!, a Nintendo classic that thrived on reading opponent’s tells and responding quickly. This is hard! But it’s an essential part of enjoying Sekiro’s combat system.

The absence of character classes and traditional builds is a gap filled by an extremely sharp sword. Countless games—including FromSoftware’s own work with Otogi and Ninja Blade—treat swords not like perfectly balanced instruments of death, but rather dull knives that must be repeatedly inserted into a person to kill them. Like Bushido Blade, a, exacting fighting game SquareEnix has long forgotten, swords are treated as serious weapons and can kill a person instantly. Encounters in Sekiro, unless you’ve made some particularly unwise choices, function as duels. The action happens considerably fast, but it’s still a matter of anticipation and precision over dishing out whatever action comes to mind. Even when you’re surrounded, there’s usually a way to create enough space for isolation.

The presentation of combat makes it easy and rewarding to learn from mistakes. It feels good to parry correctly, witness the Posture meter of your opponent rise, and hear that appropriate clanking steel-on-steel sound effect. The ethereal whoosh and camera repositioning when a Deathblow is due is another visual signal and a Pavlovian reward. FromSoftware’s often-reused “blood spilling out of a massive wound” splash noise is a macabre dessert. Sekiro respects and gratifies the player with its presentation as quickly as it does with its Skill Points and Sen.

With its array of Prosthetic Tool items, both under considerable limitations, Sekiro provides options for those uninterested (or not always capable) of straight combat. Shurikens are essential for disrupting enemy attacks and the Loaded Axe is an absolute requirement for breaking down shields. Firecrackers are intended to frighten beast-type enemies, but somehow leave almost every opponent open and vulnerable for a brief moment (and I never would have finished off the Demon of Hatred without them). Varieties of sugar can be chewed to act as timed buffs for Posture, Vitality, and Attack. Managing these options is One More Thing To Remember inside of every battle, but they’re a valid means of moving forward. Progress is progress.

The judges of combat proficiency are, as expected, Sekiro’s lineup of menacing bosses. With a selection of attacks and multiple Deathblow requirements, each present a struggle not found in the one or two-note normal enemies. Gyoubu Masataka Oniwa, with a gigantic battlefield and a thunderously intimidating horse, tests the player’s management of space and range. Genichiro Ashina, the third major foe and the first of Sekiro’s breaking points, combines melee and ranged combat to eliminate retreat and safety. The Guardian Ape, depending on your preferred tactics, either specializes in red herrings or calls for wild mechanical innovation. Every boss feels like an exam for a different lesson.

To my surprise, Sekiro seemed unusually willing to take a break. A few bosses are essentially gimmick encounters where the player must consider their environment before their bloodlust. A level-spanning and physically monstrous late game encounter and the puzzle-like Folding Screen Monkeys rely more on active planning than sorting out a routine. The worst people on the internet will see this as confirmation of Sekiro’s frailty, but it’s better classified as a welcomed break from a routine and an alternative measure of basic mechanics. With the size, skill, and surprise of its “core” boss encounters, Sekiro still has plenty of red meat.

I had finished four of FromSoftware’s five Souls-style games but Sekiro was the first where I felt I really, introspectively understood what was happening inside of its major combat encounters. I didn’t play to win every time out. I accepted failure was part of the routine and tried to respond accordingly. Taking mental inventory of an opponent’s moves, committing parry patterns to short-term memory, and understanding personal weakness (like when to back off) became integral parts of the process. Luck was removed from an equation in which, somewhere, I had always been depending on some of it. Sekiro made me understand that, while bosses are bound to their programming, I was not. Finding victory was as simple as taking control away. I don’t know that I would have realized this had Sekiro not scaled back on stats, weapons, and odd minutia and focused on a specific form of combat.

The frame allowance for parrying is more generous than it may initially suggest. You need to get the general flow of combat down but pressing the block button in the neighborhood of the right frame is usually good enough. You don’t need to be Daigo and you don’t even need to be especially good at timing-intensive action games like Metal Gear Rising or Bayonetta. The Step Dodge, Sekiro’s term for its evasion move, on the other hand, will you get you in trouble quickly. It’s impossible to block while you’re still in the dodge animation, and dodging, in general, is a behavior that may be easier to coach for Sekiro newcomers instead of Souls veterans.

Skills can also approximate the closest Sekiro gets to allowing different character builds. Organized into trees contained inside of five Esoteric Texts, Skills can be opened with your Skill Points. Latent Skills, like increasing Posture damage or Sen acquisition, operate in the background. Most active Skills function as Combat Arts, Sekiro’s language for one-off special moves. Only one can be equipped at a time, but offer a range of tricks—unblockable attacks, Posture damaging blows, modest attempts at crowd control—to help sort the periphery of combat. It’s impossible to get every skill without significant grinding, leaving me to abandon most Skills related to the Prosthetic Tool. It’s easy for me to imagine, however, a style of play that keeps those in focus.

There are benefits to knowing every corner of Sekiro’s massive levels. I had played the Ashina Reservoir section of Ashina Castle over so many times that I was able to efficiently grapple around, stealthily kill, and effectively murder the its collection of inhabitants in about ten seconds. I was operating with sight lines and planned-movement goals like I was playing Jet Set Radio and (haphazardly) even discovered a cliff-side backdoor to one of that area’s sub-boss. Other than Mibu Village, which is an environment that thrives on indiscriminate chaos, the entirety of Sekiro operates with Ashina Reservoir’s cadence.

Knowing a level top-to-bottom also reveals its potential for stealth assaults. Creeping around in tall grass or sneaking up behind someone, both leading to Deathblow opportunities, is an essential component of playing Sekiro. Complete familiarity—either by trial and error repeats or simply appreciating the game—reveals paths toward erasing everyone on the premises. This also goes toward working your way behind or on top of sub-bosses and instantly removing one of their Deathblow requirements. Understanding that every enemy is placed with intent makes Sekiro easier to process. In addition to asking yourself what lessons it’s trying to teach, it’s satisfying to pass a class with straight A’s.

Dying has a game-spanning penalty on Sekiro’s narrative. As you perish, and perish again if you choose to resurrect once after death, you’ll begin to accumulate various forms of Rot Essence. This affects almost every non-playable character in Sekiro. It can be cured with an item, but the availability of that item is limited. This severely affected how I played the first half of Sekiro, before the game was released and before I knew if there were be any tangible penalty. Two weeks and sixty hours later, it’s not as bad as I feared, but it still has a negative mental effect every time when I died and it got worse. If FromSoftware wanted to tie Sekiro’s world together and integrate the player as an active participant, Dragon Rot successfully adds that tension.

Sekiro is also, probably, FromSoftware at its most humorous. This is a strange observation from a game with a deathly serious narrative consumed by elements of remorse, agony, and entitlement, but there’s a specific gallows humor lurking in and out of view. Most present is a sequence with a rather large reptile and a widely celebrated event with a kite on rooftops of Ashina Castle. It’s lodged somewhere between despairing odds and the knowledge that, somehow, there has to be a way through what madness just happened. Any rational person would see this as cruelty, and perhaps this is either Stockholm Syndrome or a coping mechanism, but I think pieces of Sekiro are hilarious.

Less amusing is Sekiro’s camera. Certain instances of attempted stealth, especially in the tall grass of the Hirata Estate, are obstructed by not being able to see much of anything. In battles with the Guardian Ape and the Demon of Hatred I was pushed into a wall and, due to the size of my opponent, blinded by level geometry. A Shichimen Warrior’s floating glowey orb attack takes over the camera and the claustrophobia of the Lone Shadow’s confines added a layer of difficulty that, I hope, was not intentional. For a game that arrives with the guarantee that dying is no one’s fault but your own, these instances felt incongruous.

Everything evaporates under the rush of a hard-earned victory. There is a boss in Sekiro who resurfaces much later on. On the first encounter I spent hours memorizing every move for every phase and, eventually, dispatched them with smug ease. One week and thirty in-game hours later, all of that information was still in my head and, even though I was surprised to see them, I sent them to their grave without much fuss. There has always been an extraordinary sense of satisfaction when I could steal a victory in a FromSoftware game. It feels even better when it’s properly earned. From the sensory overload of Rez’s Area 5 to the melancholic collapse of Shadow of the Colossus’ epilogue, the medium is not short on pulling a dramatic response from the player. A practiced, fought, and won victory is Sekiro is up there with the best of them.

The catch 22 of Sekiro’s difficulty is it narrows its range of appeal and lowers the percentage of players who can experience what I experienced. Of course there will be legions of people who bulldoze everything in the game with zero upgrades and demand everyone else get on their level. There will also be people who put it down after being crushed too many times. Every game is not for everyone but I can’t come up with a rational argument for Sekiro not scaling its sense of accomplishment across a broader range. It’s probably very hard to make! It could easily double the amount of planning and design work (and budget) necessary to implement a difficulty scale, or figure out how to align players with their best  difficulty option. I get it, I just wish I could share it.

There is no satisfaction in immortality. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice proves its thesis by matching the resolve of its protagonist with the potential of its player in a performance choreographed by agonizing lessons and industrious rehearsals. When it’s showtime presentation seems instinctive and proficiency feels powerful. Sekiro demands immense competence, but, once its needs are met, the payoff is irresistible.