Judging by the Inbox reaction so far, I must be the only person who’s come away from my initial time with Sekiro extremely disappointed. I really, really wanted to like it, but it feels like the game’s elements are all at war with each other and leaving behind a maddening experience.
I wasn’t expecting it to be exactly like the Dark Souls games (which incidentally I’m currently playing through) or Bloodborne, but it feels like From tried to shoehorn elements from those games into a Tenchu-like stealth/action hybrid and the result is a bit of a mess, in my opinion. Where it all falls down for me is the combat; it feels so rigid, more reliant on rote memorisation with no room for using a style that’s comfortable for you. It feels more like a rigid quick-time event.
Don’t even get me started on the total absence of any sort of crowd control (none that I could find, anyway). I suppose it also doesn’t help that the combat is so reliant on deflection and parrying, the things I’m the absolute worst at in any of the Soulsborne games, but here there’s basically no alternative. It’s a case of ‘Do it this way or die’, which isn’t fun for me.
The nail in the coffin is that the punishment for dying is way, way too harsh. At least in the Soulsborne games there was a chance you could get your progress back. In Sekiro, if you die, that’s it; you lose half your stuff permanently, and dying too many times means there’s even less of a chance that you’ll be able to hold onto it. It basically eliminates any idea of progressing your character, nor can you tailor them to suit your playstyle, and it basically destroyed all my motivation to continue.
I think it’s safe to say that I’ve given up on Sekiro. It’s not gelling with me at all, not because it’s hard, but because every death feels unfair, something I could never say about the Soulsborne games.
Andrew Middlemas
