So, as the title says, i've recently picked up Sekiro, and, let me first give a bit of context. Sekiro is a game developed by FromSoftware, for who knows it's the sofware house that developed all the Dark Souls and Elden Ring, plus Demon's souls, Bloodborne etc etc... it's a sofware house that is well known to put difficulty in their games, from what the Dark souls became and stuff... I am a huge fan of the Souls series, aswell as Elden ring, i also finished a couple of them without levelling up and i have overall more than a thousand hours of gameplay, so i'm not saying i'm exactly PRO but i am well used to this kind of gameplay, but holy FUCK Sekiro.

To explain why sekiro is actually so hard, i need to explain more about how it works and the "gameplay loop" for fighting in the other games... in Dark Souls, you have a couple of options, the first one is having a shield, it can block attacks and then you can attack back, it's not always like this I KNOW if anyone ever played the game knows, but this is one of the options, the second one is rolling, or better explained as "Dodge", the reason being that the rolling animation has some I-frames (i am in doubt if it means Invulnerability frames or Invisibility frames but you get the point) where if you time it right, you won't take any damage, and then last proper resource is the parry. a dedicated anymation that if you pull off correctly it lets you do a critical hit on the enemy, very powerful but not very easy to learn

On the other hand in Sekiro... well, you have to parry, you HAVE other options, but it's most important to parry the enemy, you don't have stamina, and the parry mechanic is less like dark souls but more like i belive lies of P, where the button to parry and defend is the same, if you press at the right time the button you'll get a perfect parry, doing so it will start to fill the guard meter of the opponent, imagine like a guard break, if you fill it up the enemy is fully clear to get a critical hit that will ALWAYS be an instakill, depleting the active health bar. it's... easier, at times, and if you get in the groove it's really satisfying, but it's a skill really important to master to even think of enjoying the game, it's impossible to tihnk of playing sekiro without parrying bossess, you can, but it would be miserable. also god it looks so good...

last bit, honestly this is also in my opinion the best looking FromSoftware game. i have played Elden Ring, not nightreign BUT i played enough games, i am still a big fan of medieval looking games, but man, Sekiro is so pretty, and i do not mean for the "iT's JaPaN1!11!!!1" but for the lights, the fire, the whole look of the game feels different from any other FS game, not sure why, it might just be a different engine in some ways??

in the end... do i suggest Sekiro? uuuuh, i mean, if you're up for a challenge, absolutely, it's an amazing game that challanges even experienced souls players so go for it!

Sekiro : Shadow die twice... Holy it's hard!