There is a moment, somewhere in the first ten hours ofSekiro: Shadows Die Twice, when the noise resolves into music. Up to that point you have been doing what every FromSoftware game sinceDemon’s Souls trained you to do: circle, wait, punish, roll away, drink, repeat. Sekiro tolerates none of it. The dodge is bad on purpose. The healing is scarce on purpose. Backing off gives your opponent the one thing the whole design refuses to hand you, which is time to recover. And then the penny drops, the sword comes in, you press L1 on the exact frame it lands, and the game answers with a metal chime that is unmistakably a downbeat.

That chime is the thesis. Released by FromSoftware in March 2019 under Activision, directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki,Sekiro is filed on shelves next toDark Souls andBloodborne, and it is a different genus entirely. The Souls games are about resource management under threat. Sekiro is about tempo. Once you hear it that way, everything from the posture bar to the resurrection mechanic to the game’s famously unbudging refusal of a difficulty slider snaps into a single coherent argument.

The posture bar is the whole game

Every FromSoftware combat system before this one ran on a health bar and a stamina bar, and your job was to spend the second to drain the first. Sekiro keeps health — vitality — and quietly demotes it. The bar that matters isposture, and posture is a balance meter. Land a hit, chip it. Deflect a hit, chip it harder. Let it fill and your opponent’s guard breaks, exposing them to a deathblow: one animated, unambiguous, fight-ending strike.

The clever part is what posture does when nothing is happening. Itrecovers, and it recovers faster the healthier the character is. That single rule is the engine of the entire game. It means backing off to breathe hands your progress back. It means the correct way to kill a boss is to stay inside their reach and keep the pressure on, which is precisely the thing a decade of Souls play taught you never to do. Sekiro spends its first act unteaching you, and the unteaching hurts, because the muscle memory it is fighting is your own.

So the posture bar converts defence into offence. A deflect — a block timed to the frame the blade arrives — costs you nothing, and costs them posture. Which means the optimal defensive action and the optimal aggressive action are the same button, pressed at the same moment. That is a rhythm system, dressed in Sengoku steel, and it explains why the game feels so bad until it suddenly feels superb. You are not learning tactics. You are learning a chart.

Why the deflect window works

Plenty of games have parries. Most of them make the parry a gamble: high risk, high reward, punished hard on a miss. Sekiro does something more generous and much more demanding. Mistime a deflect and you still block — you eat posture damage rather than a wound. The failure state of a perfect input is a mediocre input. That’s a design decision with enormous downstream consequences, because it means the game can hand you a boss who attacks in eight-hit chains and expect you to hold the line through all eight. You will not die from the third one. You will die from your posture cracking on the seventh.

Sitting on top of that are the perilous attacks, flagged with a red kanji, and they are the game’s genius stroke. Each one demands adifferent answer, and the answers are not interchangeable. A thrust wants the Mikiri Counter — step into the spear, not away from it. A sweep wants a jump. A grab wants your legs. The red kanji flashes with barely enough warning to react, which means you cannot read the symbol and then decide; you have to have already learned the animation that precedes it and be committed before the warning arrives. The symbol is a confirmation, not an instruction.

That is exactly how a rhythm game’s approach notes work. The note tells you what to hit and when, and by the time you consciously register it, your hands are already moving. Sekiro isGuitar Hero where the chart is a man with a naginata and the fail state is being taken apart at your own hearth.

Look for the real ancestor and you land onPunch-Out!!, where every opponent was a fixed loop of tells to be memorised and answered, and where “getting good” meant learning a script rather than raising a stat. I’d file the C64 and Amiga fighting games of my teens in the same family —The Way of the Exploding Fist,IK+ — where the whole contest lived in a single well-timed input and the loser was the one who twitched early. Sekiro is that lineage given twenty-five years of animation budget. Its cousins are elsewhere on this desk:Nine Sols takes the deflect and rebuilds it in two dimensions, and does it well enough to be worth the comparison rather than embarrassed by it.

The resurrection mechanic, and what it actually costs

Sekiro lets you die and get back up. Press the button, Wolf rises where he fell, and the fight continues from the enemy’s current state. On paper it’s a mercy. In practice it’s the most interesting piece of tuning in the game, because standing back up mid-fight puts you exactly where you least want to be — inside a boss’s active attack chain, at low health, with your posture recovery crippled. The revival hands you a chance and a worse position at the same time.

It also feeds the Dragonrot system, the game’s tax on repetition. Die often and NPCs across Ashina fall ill, sidequests stall, and your Unseen Aid — the chance of keeping your money on death — drops. Dragonrot is curable, and it is not really a punishment so much as a slow, visible pressure. The world coughs when you fail. It is one of the few times a FromSoftware game has made death mean something narratively without making it mean less mechanically.

The upgrade economy runs on the same honesty. Vitality and posture rise from Prayer Beads, and beads come in fours, from minibosses. Attack power rises from Battle Memories, and memories come from bosses. Healing capacity rises from Gourd Seeds. There is no build to hide behind. InElden Ring a wall can be walked around, out-levelled, or answered with a summon and a bleed build. Sekiro’s wall is a person, and the only thing that gets you past them is that you have learned the song. That is either the purest thing FromSoftware has ever made or the most obstinate, and the honest answer is that it’s both.

Where it fights itself

The prosthetic tools are the weakest system in the game, and it’s instructivewhy. Firecrackers, the Flame Vent, the Loaded Axe, the Umbrella — they’re inventive, they’re beautifully animated, and most players find two they like and never touch the rest. The reason is structural: the deflect loop is so complete, so self-sufficient, that the tools have nowhere to sit except as situational counters to specific enemy types. The game builds a second toolkit and then designs a combat system that doesn’t need it. The Loaded Umbrella against the Guardian Ape’s terror scream is genuinely essential; most of the rest is decoration on a machine that runs fine without it.

Stealth has a similar problem. Sekiro gives you a grappling hook, a crouch, ledge-hanging and one-hit backstab deathblows, and it’s a fine way to strip a boss arena of its rank-and-file before the real fight begins. It is also almost entirely optional and almost entirely absent from the encounters that define the game. The stealth exists to get you to the rhythm section.

The difficulty argument that swallowed the internet in 2019 looks different from here. FromSoftware shipped no difficulty options and took a proper kicking for it, and in October 2020 patched in Reflection of Strength for boss rematches and the Gauntlets of Strength — more ways to practise the chart rather than ways to lower it. Whatever you think of the accessibility question, the studio’s position was at least coherent with the design. You cannot ease a rhythm game without changing the song, and the song is the game.

The verdict

Sekiro is the most focused thing FromSoftware has built, and focus cuts both ways. It offers one answer to one question and asks you to get very good at it, which produces a stretch of about six hours in the middle where nothing works and you suspect the game is broken, followed by a click, followed by some of the finest one-on-one combat ever animated. Isshin, Genichiro, the Guardian Ape — these fights land because you arrive at them as a different player from the one who started, and you can feel the difference in your hands.

It doesn’t do the thing the Souls games do, where a hundred people play the same boss a hundred ways. Everyone beats Sekiro identically, because there is one way. Whether that’s purity or narrowness depends entirely on how much you want a game to hold an opinion. This one holds a very strong one, and it’s right.

Play it on PC or PlayStation; it runs fine on both and the frame timing is the whole product, so give it stable hardware. If it takes and you want the same grammar in a different key,Nine Sols is the sharpest descendant going, andArmored Core VI is FromSoftware doing the same trick with a stagger bar and a rocket launcher.

Spoilers below

The design argument closes at Isshin, the Sword Saint. Three phases, no gimmick, no environmental trick, no summon — just the game asking whether you learned it. The first phase is Genichiro again, which is a joke at your expense and a genuinely kind one: the man who annihilated you in hour three is now the warm-up. Isshin’s second phase adds the spear and the thrusts, and every thrust is a Mikiri check. The third adds lightning, and the lightning is the only moment in the whole game where a piece of the toolkit outside the deflect loop becomes mandatory — the Lightning Reversal, learned from a fisherman, thirty hours earlier, in a place you probably haven’t thought about since.

That’s the argument landing. Sekiro’s final exam tests one skill, and the skill is listening. Everything else — the tools, the stealth, the Dragonrot, the Sculptor’s grief — is set dressing on a metronome. The Shura ending, where Wolf turns on his own oath, is thematically the right shadow to hang over a game about obedience to a rhythm. You do what you are told, on the beat, for forty hours. Then it asks whether you can stop.

The first thingElden Ring does, once it lets go of your hand in Limgrave, is show you a castle. Stormveil sits up on its rock in the north-west, visible from most of the starting region, lit and enormous and obviously important. There is no marker on it. There is no quest in your log telling you to go there. There is a castle, and there is you, and the game has correctly calculated that this is sufficient.

FromSoftware and Bandai Namco shipped it on 25 February 2022 across five platforms, it sold in numbers that embarrassed the entire genre, and two years on the interesting question isn’t whether it’s good. It’s whythis open world holds when so many don’t, given that it contains most of the same parts as the ones that don’t.

Navigation by sightline

Here is the design decision everything else hangs off. The map fills in when you find a stele and read it, and the map it gives you is adrawing — terrain, rivers, roads, the shape of things — with nothing on it that tells you what to do. Your objective marker is a shaft of golden light that leans in a direction from every Site of Grace, and you are free to ignore it forever, which most people do for the first twenty hours.

What replaces the checklist is your own eyes. You crest a hill on Torrent and there’s a cathedral in a swamp, or a ruined manor, or a shaft of light coming out of a well, and you go and look. The information that drives navigation lives in the world geometry rather than the UI layer, which means that the act of playing and the act of deciding what to play are the same act. The Ubisoft tower solved a real problem — how do I tell the player what’s out there — and it solved it by moving the world into a menu. FromSoftware solved it by building a skyline.

The mechanical consequence is that curiosity has an actual cost. Riding to that cathedral takes ninety seconds you could have spent elsewhere, you might die on arrival, and nothing promised you a reward. So the reward, when it comes, isyours in a way that a completed checklist item never is. That’s the loop. It’s very old and almost nobody runs it, because it requires the confidence to let players miss things — andElden Ring lets you miss an enormous amount. Entire questlines, entire underground regions the size of a normal game’s map. Ranni’s line alone is missable by walking past a door.

Why the fear survives the freedom

The obvious risk in going open-world with a Souls game was that difficulty stops meaning anything when the player can walk away from any fight. FromSoftware’s answer is a rune economy that makes walking away expensive in the right way.

Die with runes on you, they drop where you fell. Die again on the way back, they’re gone. In a corridor game that’s a tense trip down a familiar hall. In an open world it’s a ride across hostile terrain, and the map is full of things that hit like a truck and are placed exactly where you’d want to gallop. The genius bit is Torrent’s double-jump and the spirit springs: you’re fast enough to escape almost anything, so death is nearly always a decision you made. The game gives you the exit and then watches you decline it.

Then there’s the Spirit Calling Bell. Summonable ashes are the difficulty slider FromSoftware refused to put in the options menu, and giving them to you inside the fiction — a bell, an item, a thing you upgrade with Grave Glovewort — is a better answer than a difficulty select, because it costs FP and it changes how the fight reads. Bring the Mimic Tear and a boss becomes a two-front problem it wasn’t designed for. That’s a legitimate solve. Nobody has to tick a box marked EASY, and the fight’s identity survives.

Where it fights itself

The padding is real and I’m not going to be polite about it. The Lands Between contains roughly a hundred and fifty catacombs, caves and mines, and a substantial share of them end in an Erdtree Avatar or an Ulcerated Tree Spirit you have already fought, in a room shaped like the last room, for a reward you’ll shard down for materials. The dragons are worse: after the third Flying Dragon you can read the entire encounter in two seconds.

This matters because the whole navigational thesis depends on the horizon keeping its promises. Every recycled Erdtree Avatar is a small withdrawal from the trust that makes you ride towards the next unexplained shape. By the Consecrated Snowfield, plenty of players have stopped detouring — which is the design defeating itself, and it happened because the map was sized by ambition instead of content.

The back third is also where the legacy dungeons start doing FromSoftware’s older, meaner thing — narrow, vertical, interlocking — and it’s a reminder that Miyazaki’s team still build the best enclosed spaces in the business. Stormveil Castle is a masterpiece of a level and it arrives in hour eight. Nothing in the open world beats it, and I think the studio knows.

The ancestor

The lineage everyone reaches for isBreath of the Wild, and the shared instinct is obvious: put a thing on a hill, let the player want it. The real ancestor runs further back, to the home-computer sandboxes that had no budget for markers and no room for a quest log. I’d point atHunter, Activision’s Amiga game from 1991 — a free-roaming island, vehicles you could just get into, objectives given asdescriptions rather than dots, and the expectation that you’d work out where things were by looking at them. It was crude and it was enormous and it navigated exactly the wayElden Ring does, thirty years earlier, because it had no other option.

Sightline navigation is what you build when youcan’t build a marker system. FromSoftware went back to it deliberately, with a budget, which is a much harder decision than it sounds.

For the studio at its most compressed, seeSekiro, which does the opposite of everything here — one moveset, one rhythm, no build-crafting, no escape — and is arguably the betterdesigned game. For the studio’s other 2023 answer to the same question of what a Souls game is once you take the sword away, there’sArmored Core VI. And if you want the open-world argument made in miniature by a much smaller team,Tunic hides its entire map in a manual and dares you to read it.

The verdict, argued

Elden Ring is the best argument in years that an open world can be aplace rather than a delivery route, and it makes that argument with a hundred and fifty dungeons of evidence against it. Both things are true. The first thirty hours are the finest exploration design of the decade; the last twenty are a very good Souls game wearing an oversized coat.

What it earned, it earned by holding a line every other studio abandoned: it refuses to tell you where to go. That refusal is what makes the castle on the horizon mean anything, and it’s why people who bounced offDark Souls three times finished this one. Beingtold was always the barrier.

It’s on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Series X|S and PC, and it runs best on PC with a frame cap you set yourself. Start as a Vagabond, ignore the golden light for as long as you can stand it, and go look at the castle.

Play next:Sekiro if you want FromSoftware with every fat trimmed off.

Spoilers below

The moment the design fully tips its hand is Leyndell.

You spend forty hours riding towards a golden tree that is visible from everywhere in the Lands Between — the single largest sightline in the game, the thing that has been telling you where north is since Limgrave. Then you reach the capital underneath it, fight your way to the base, and discover the tree is sealed behind thorns that no weapon touches. The navigational landmark that organised the entire map turns out to be a locked door.

What follows is the game’s best structural joke and its most divisive stretch. You godown — the Siofra and Deeproot depths, an entire second map hanging under the first — and then Leyndell burns, and you come back up to a version of the capital filled with ash where the geometry you learned is now a trap. The open world resolves into the closed one. Farum Azula is pure late-period FromSoftware corridor design, floating in the sky, and Torrent is useless there, which is the point. The horse gave you freedom for forty hours and then the game takes it back for the ending, because the ending is about arriving rather than choosing.

Malenia is the other tell. Waterfowl Dance is a three-part flurry that covers the arena and kills most builds outright, and there is a widespread view that it’s unfair. It isn’t quite — it’s dodgeable, the timings are published, thousands of people do it hitless — but it’s designed against the grain of everything the open world taught you. Open-worldElden Ring rewards preparation, level-scaling and bringing a bigger hammer. Malenia doesn’t care about your hammer. She’s aSekiro boss wearing a Souls skin, sitting in an optional tower at the end of a missable region, and she’s there to remind you which studio you’re dealing with.

The endings, meanwhile, are the weakest thing in it. Four cutscenes and a Frenzied Flame variant, gated on questlines most players never touch, delivered as text. After two hundred hours of a world that spoke entirely in geometry, the finale speaks in paragraphs. The game that trusted your eyes for the whole ride ends by reading to you.

Ten years is a long time to leave a series in a cupboard.Armored Core: Verdict Day came out in 2013, and then FromSoftware went and became the most influential studio in action games on somebody else’s dime, and the mechs sat in the dark while everyone learned to say “Souls-like” with a straight face.Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon arrived on 25 August this year, published by Bandai Namco, directed by Masaru Yamamura — lead game designer onSekiro — after Hidetaka Miyazaki started it and handed it over.

Read that credit list again, because it’s the review. This is a mech game directed by the man who designedSekiro, and it plays exactly like you’d fear and hope.

The stagger bar is a posture bar

Every enemy inAC6 has an ACS gauge — Attitude Control System — that fills as you land impact damage. Fill it and the target staggers: it stops, it can’t act, and every hit you land while it’s down does bonus damage under the Direct Hit system. Your own ACS works the same way, so a boss can do it to you.

That isSekiro’s posture bar with a coat of engine grease on it. Same shape, same argument: health is the score, and the real fight is over a second meter that measures whether you’re being allowed to act. Both games invert the natural instinct — chip away safely, retreat, repeat — because retreating lets the gauge drain. Pressure is the mechanic. Patience is the trap.

The difference is what you press.Sekiro gave you one sword and asked for timing.AC6 gives you four weapon hardpoints — a gun in each hand, a launcher on each shoulder — and asks for abuild that can fill an ACS bar faster than it empties. Impact and damage are separate stats on separate weapons. The pulse gun that shreds shields is bad against armour. The bazooka that staggers in two hits reloads slowly enough to lose you the window it just opened. So the assembly screen stops being a fashion choice and becomes the answer sheet for the fight you’re about to lose.

I want to be exact about why this feels good, because “customisation” is a lazy description of it. The assembly screen constrains you three ways at once: total weight against your legs’ load, energy draw against your generator’s output, and the boosters that turn all of it into movement. Change the arms and your legs are overloaded. Fix the legs and the generator won’t feed the shoulders. Every build is a small optimisation problem with a personality on the other side of it, and the game grades your answer in about ninety seconds of live fire.

Missions, not a world

AC6 is mission-based, and afterElden Ring that reads as a retreat. It isn’t. Mission structure is what makes the assembly screen mean anything: you get a briefing, you get a rough idea of what’s in there, and then you build for it. An open world would dissolve that instantly, because a build for everything is a build for nothing. The garage needs a door with a known thing behind it.

This is theSekiro lesson applied at a different scale. That game’s tightest design decision was refusing to let you respec your way around a wall, so the wall had to be climbed.AC6 lets you respec completely and for free between attempts — parts cost money, and the game refunds parts at full price, so experimentation is genuinely free — and then puts a wall in front of you anyway. The wall is the same. The tool for getting past it is a spreadsheet instead of a reflex, at first.

Chapter one’s is called Balteus, and it has already become the internet’s argument. It’s a hovering flying fortress with a shield, a missile barrage that fills the sky, and a second phase that sets the arena on fire. It arrives roughly three hours in and it stops a very large number of players dead, in the exact way the Genichiro fight did and the Asylum Demon didn’t. FromSoftware have used this shape for fifteen years: an early fight whose job is toteach, by refusing to let a bad answer through, long before the hardest fights arrive. Balteus’s lesson is that your loadout is a hypothesis, and that the pulse weapons the game gave you an hour ago are not decoration. People who bounce off it are usually people still trying to win with the starting build, which is the point — the game is telling you to go back to the garage and it is telling you loudly.

Where it fights itself

Two seams, and neither is fatal.

The first is that the boss rush eats the missions. When the duels are this good, the connective tissue — clear this outpost, escort this thing, hold this line — reads as a corridor between the good parts. The level design is smart and mostly brief, and it is still hard to care about a supply depot when there’s a duel waiting.

The second is the repair kit economy. You carry a fixed number of repair kits into a mission; that’s your entire healing budget, and it doesn’t refill at checkpoints in the way you’ll want it to. The intention is attrition. The effect, in practice, is that a mission you’re limping through is usually better abandoned early and started again clean, which is the design quietly paying you to give up. It’s a small thing. It sits in your teeth.

Then there’s the structure.AC6 wants three passes: NG+ and NG++ unlock new missions, new fights and different endings, and the story is genuinely unrecoverable from a single run. I take a forty-hour ask seriously as a thing demanded of a reader’s life, and I’ll defend this one — the repeats are short, the new content is real, and the mission list you’re re-running takes twenty minutes a sitting. But the game should say so on the tin, and it doesn’t.

The ancestors

The obvious one isArmored Core itself, 1997, on the PlayStation. I came to that one the way most Europeans did — through a magazine that couldn’t decide whether it was a sim or an action game — and it was genuinely both, in the sense that it was mostly a menu. You spent an hour in the garage, ninety seconds in the field, and the ninety seconds told you your hour was wrong.AC6 preserves that ratio with the lag taken out.

The deeper ancestor is the mech sim:MechWarrior 2 in 1995, the heat management and the loadout tonnage and the sense of driving a building.AC6 keeps the tonnage and deletes the weight of the walk. Its mechs move like a fighting-game character with a jetpack, which is precisely the fusion — sim maths, arcade hands.

And theSekiro debt, again, whichI’ve written about at length: this is FromSoftware’s second game about a meter that isn’t health, and they’re now unambiguously better at that than they are at hit points.

The verdict

Fires of Rubicon is FromSoftware admitting what they’ve actually been good at since 2019: the duel. It has dressed the duel in a garage, and the garage is a brilliant piece of design, because it converts “get better at this fight” into “understand this fight well enough to describe it in parts”. The mission wrapper is the weakest layer. The bosses are among the best they’ve made, which given the company is a serious sentence.

If you bounced offElden Ring because the open world diluted the fights, this is the concentrate. If you lovedthe open world FromSoftware earned, this will feel small until Balteus, and then it won’t. It’s on PC, PlayStation and Xbox; the PC version is where the assembly screen is comfortable, and the assembly screen is where you’ll live.

Go back to the garage. That’s the game.

Spoilers below

The three endings are the argument the missions can’t make. Fires of Raven, Liberator of Rubicon and — behind two full playthroughs — Alea Iacta Est all turn on what you do about Coral and about Ayre, and the structure means you can’t be told what the choice costs until you’ve already made it once. That’s an old-fashioned use of NG+, and it works, because 621 is a merc who doesn’t get context until someone pays for it. The player and the character learn the world in the same order.

The Sea Spider is the fight that reveals the real design. It has no gimmick weakness and no phase you can skip. It is a pure demand that you understand the ACS system, played at a tempo where the stagger window is worth roughly one good decision. Beating it means you have finally stopped thinking of your build as a preference.

And Walter’s arc is the closest FromSoftware have come to writing a boss who is sad rather than mysterious. The final chapter’s willingness to make a man’s principles into a health bar is unsubtle and it lands, mostly because the game has spent a whole campaign teaching you that everyone on Rubicon is renting their convictions from somebody with money.