I finally finished up Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. I forget exactly when I started playing the game. I had initially purchased Red Dead Redemption 2 and Grand Theft Auto V. I played those games for about a week. Then I saw Sekiro sitting there at the Gamestop, and I thought “what the hell? I’ll give it a shot.” And I was completely hooked.
Must have been a month ago, maybe two.
I don’t play games for extended periods of time. Often it’s just for an hour or so a day, usually once I get done with all of my work and chores. I did get really into Sekiro, though, meaning there were stretches of play up to three hours. I stayed up too late some days, hacking away at it. Completely immersed.
Aesthetically, the game is so cool. You’re a one-armed shinobi in 16th-century Japan. It all looks very beautiful, very romantic. The combat is amazing. It’s notoriously difficult to master, but once you get it down, there’s never been a game that makes you feel more badass, in my experience. It tricks the brain into feeling as though you’re in the middle of a sword fight. So great.
The story rocks, too. It’s understated and cryptic, at least until the end, and you have to piece a lot of the puzzle together even after the fact (I had to do a YouTube deep dive to understand a lot of it).
Now I have the Dark Souls trilogy to get through. I started playing through the first yesterday, alarmed by things like stamina meters and the slowness of my character. But it’s pretty easy so far, since I’m used to the fast pace of Sekiro, and the gameplay mechanics are largely similar, just on turtle mode.
I’m at a castle thing, grinding for XP. I killed an Asylum demon, got picked up by a huge raven, deposited in Firelink Shrine, and I’m now on my way to Undead Burg. I’ve been to all these places before in the Switch version, but now I’m on the TV, and now I’m actually kind of good at games.
It’s fun.
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