EDITOR’S
CHOICESekiro: Shadows
Die Twice
THINK GAMES ARE EASY? SEKIRO WILL PUT YOU IN YOUR PLACE STEVE BOXER
PUBLISHER ACTIVISION / DEVELOPER FROMSOFTWARE / RELEASE DATE OUT NOW / COST £59.99/$59.99for the developer. So what’s new?
Well, not a great deal. While it has
various elements we haven’t seen
in Dark Souls or Bloodborne, Sekiro’s
underlying design still conforms to the
general formula of its predecessors.
And it’s hair-tearingly hard, naturally.
Sekiro’s setting, at least, is
different. Its action takes place in
an impressively decorous rendering
of 1500s Japan, during the Sengoku
period. You play a shinobi known as
the Wolf, who has sworn to protect a
young noble. But the Wolf’s master is
kidnapped – in the process of which
the shinobi’s left arm is severed –
setting up the game’s premise, namely
that the Wolf must rescue him.
Sekiro, then, places a greater
emphasis on having some sort of
narrative thrust than its predecessors:
the odd cutscene and the chanceBack in the dim and
distant days of the
games industry,
there used to be a
debate about how
hard games should
be. Then, in 2009, FromSoftware blew
any such considerations with its RPG
Demon’s Souls.
Demon’s Souls was sadistically
hard, and launched the Japanese
developer on a follow-up trajectory
which spawned the Dark Souls games
and Bloodborne (collectively known
as Soulsborne games). None of those
showed a hint of compromise, an
approach which generated an army of
fans and cupboards full of awards.
FromSoftware concluded the
Soulsborne games with 2016’s Dark
Souls III, so Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
is the beginning of a new chapter
to converse with random characters
maintain the storyline’s flow.
But FromSoftware’s newfound
enthusiasm for a modicum of narrative
doesn’t go so far that it turns Sekiro
into some sort of story-led RPG:
its gameplay, as in the Soulsborne
games, still involves inching your
way through intense encounters with
clumps of enemies, 50 to 100 yards at
a time, and constantly adjusting your
strategic approach in order to not die
over and over again. For Sekiro, they
have been renamed, but you still find
the equivalents of Soulsborne icons
like bonfires and Estus flasks.Prosthetic aesthetic
From the off, though, there are new
gameplay mechanics on display,
which add a real air of freshness. Early
on, the Wolf encounters a sculptorABOVE The
grappling hook
adds a whole new
dimension to the
usual Soulsborne
design we’re
used to.
LEFT No
character
creators here,
in Sekiro your
character is
already defined.No spoilers, but Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has three possible endings, depending on how you play through itMore Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE 075REVIEW