What a fucking game.

Sekiro burrows into the folds of your brain when it sticks. After finishing it, I put it down for months, and when I picked it up again... it's like riding a bike. There is no re-learning. Genichiro kicked my ass up and down the block when I first played through the game. On my second playthrough, months later, I beat him on the first try.

Sekiro suffers from constant comparisons to the Souls games, but they are so radically different from each other that such a comparison sells the game a little short. Dark Souls is about using a variety of tools, caution, and strategy, and only using reflexes as a last resort when all else fails, which Elden Ring doubles down on. Sekiro is about flow states. I wouldn't be the first to compare it to a rhythm game as it were, though this too would be missing the full picture. There is strategy, and even some lateral thinking in encounters, the interplay between memorizing enemy attacks, using stealth and underhanded shinobi tools, converge into an extremely consistent game. Sekiro invokes a feeling of earned mastery like few other games, and it stands as another reminder that when people extol the virtues of From's games, it isn't hyperbole or pretension. It's just that good.