I was tepid on it for a while, but after a little more play I'm feeling pretty good about it.

Saw the game being played on UPF, hadn't really been aware of it before then. But I'm a big Nioh fan, and the idea of a Nioh-adjacent Team Ninja game that also had producer Masaaki Yamagiwa of Bloodborne fame working on it certainly sparked my interest. So I downloaded it on PS5 and gave it a spin.

It's an interesting beast. There are definitely some kinks to iron out. The worst offender was lost inputs. There were times where I went to attack or drink a healing potion only to have nothing at all happen. That needs to be sorted out right quick. I'm also not a big fan of the counter and dodge being mapped to the same button--one press does a counter, a second does a dodge. For me this meant that dodging always felt a little desperate with me quickly mashing the button to make it go, and I'd often end up doing it more times that I wanted; having it on a dedicated button and only needing a single press would go a long way toward helping me be more deliberate and precise with dodging.

The core combat, however, feels pretty good. It's a littler slower and less button-mashy than Nioh, with more emphasis placed on countering, not unlike Sekiro. Also like Sekiro, it ditches the concept of stamina completely in favor of a "spirit gauge," which depletes as you dodge, block, get hit, or use magic, and recovers or gains as you strike enemies or counter. It's an interesting idea, though I think it could stand to be even more visible on-screen, since it's crucial to know where your spirit is at, but is hard to keep track of sometimes in the middle of the frenetic action.

But I think the most surprising thing to me was how much better I got at the game as I played it. It seemed tuned pretty hard at first, especially the final boss, which took me at least two dozen tries to beat. But once I learned the games systems a bit better (e.g., I wasn't using magic enough previously because I was little hazy on what the cost of using it actually was), I started tearing through it. I ran through the demo a second time (it resets you to the beginning after winning, but lets you keep your equipment and levels), and beat the whole thing again pretty quickly without dying once, including beating the final boss on my first attempt. Admittedly, this time I did something I hadn't before, which was use an NPC companion to fight that jerk; that made the boss way, way easier.

So, yeah, I think I may end up picking this up at release. I'm always up for another good Souls-like, especially one that genuinely seems to be trying some new things.

I'm a huge Dynasty Warriors and Three Kingdoms fan so I'll probably end up buying it eventually when it comes to PC. I do think it's hilarious that of all the things it starts with, it starts with the Yellow Turbans of all things.

I got through the demo. TL;DR - it's got some interesting ideas, but I have enough issues with some of the core mechanics that I don't see it dethroning Nioh anytime soon.

1. I like the concept of the spirit gauge more than the execution of it. With some refinement, I think it could be cool, but right now it feels a little limited. For one thing, there are very few ways to reliably build meter outside of quick attacks. While deflects/counters do it to some degree, that relies on you waiting for the enemy to actually use an attack. That feels a little off, given that the game really seems to be encouraging aggressive combat.

For another, while I like the idea of being able to "cash in" meter to charge an attack, the heavy attack is currently the only way to do that, which also feels limiting. Personally, I think it would be better if the martial arts skills also got charged up. That would fit the setting and also make the martial arts more integrated into combat.

2. Speaking of martial arts, they felt pretty . . . useless? They spend meter, most of them have a huge windup, and they never seemed to do that much damage. They felt really superfluous with the spells, except that the spells had way more versatility since you have more control over the spell loadout and had a much wider variety of effects than the martial arts.

3. I'm very mixed on this game's version of the Guardian Spirits. It's something that if you've played the Nioh games, you can see an evolution over time as they try to sort the systems out, but they've never been able to get it quite right. It was super easy to abuse them in Nioh 1 to just have perma-invincabiltiy. In Nioh 2 they tried to change it to make it less abusable by making it much harder to charge, but the result was you only got one, maybe two uses of it per level.

Here, they seem to want a much faster charge but at the expense of the summon being almost useless. They had so much trouble tracking enemies they almost never hit anything. I know you can also choose to burn the summon on "infusing" your weapon somehow, but it was really unclear what that was actually doing for you or how it was different than the spells that just magic'd up your weapon.

4. I think the game also need to make a choice between having the traditional stats and gear system or the morale system. Having two parallel leveling systems doesn't work because it's unclear to the player which matters more. I could also see the need to go through a level and raise a bunch of flags just for the morale interfere with later playthroughs where you just want to rush the boss.

I tried messing with it a bit. I'm also a big fan of Nioh 2, so I have high hopes for this. So far, I'm still stuck in that spot where I feel like I'm missing something.

It feels like Team Ninja wanted to do their take on Sekiro after Nioh was their take on Dark Souls, but relying on the the parry mechanic seems like the worst way to approach the combat in this demo. Maybe the timing or whatever will be tweaked before release, but even looking online to see if I was doing something wrong confirms that you're better off blocking or dodging attacks instead.

Which seems like a shame because without that parry I feel like the combat might be worse than Nioh? They replaced stance switching with magic and martial arts, but the effectiveness of those seems very hit or miss and I haven't found a good or satisfying flow that approaches how I felt in the Nioh games yet. Combined with the idea of being punished for dying even beyond losing your souls has me really hoping either I'm going about this wrong, this is a bad demo, or something big changes before release.

Too many things seem to change over the coarse of demos from these folks that I think I’ll just wait and enjoy the final product. Or at least what would definitely be the final demo.

I need another Nioh though.