This game looks at the Souls series and Bloodborne and tries to learn from their mistakes while putting its own twist on both combat and exploration.

Combat is now less about rolling at the right time, and more about keeping up a strong offence whilst also defending yourself. Doing both of these things continuously and successfully will not only whittle down your enemy and keep you alive, but it will also begin to break your enemy's posture. When it breaks completely, you can perform a death blow, which will kill normal enemies and progress the phase of bosses (of which there are many). If you just mindlessly spam attacks like in BB, your enemy will defend against your attack and counterattack you. If you only defend, your enemy's posture will recover. You have to strike a perfect balance and learning to do so is the key to success in Sekiro. It's so satisfying to learn a boss' attack patterns and spend a few seconds exchanging blows and perfectly deflecting, especially when you get lucky and it ends with a death blow. Also figuring out cool ways to bring your prosthetic arm weapons into the mix is also fun and can make some fights much easier, you just have to figure out which one to use and when to use it.

Exploration is as dense as the better Souls games, but you get a grappling hook too. There are lots of items tucked into every area and there are also major branching paths almost from the word go. There are so many paths early on I actually felt overwhelmed at one point but they ended up all fitting together in clever and unexpected ways.

I think my favourite thing about this game is the lack of compromise. In Dark Souls you could find an OP weapon early on if you were struggling, or spend ages levelling to brute force your way through a tough challenge. Not here, though. You play Sekiro's way, you get good at it, or you rage quit trying.

After beating the game, and doing almost everything aside from a few mini bosses, I can say that the game's quality does not dip as you progress further in. It re-uses one area from earlier in the game, but it puts enough twists on it that I didn't mind. My only real criticisms are that the music can feel a bit samey and it doesn't look quite as good from a graphical perspective as some other games released at around the same time. It's still beautiful in places, just a (very) small step behind top notch.

Souls fans, pick it up. Non Souls fans, pick it up anyway, you might enjoy the shift in focus. A fantastic game from start to finish. This is a contender for game of the year for me, and has made its way into my list of favourites.