“From” a software company best known for their critically acclaimed game series “Dark Souls” has been known for making some of the most difficult and in some cases “unfair” video games in the current gaming spectrum. On March 22nd, From released their newest series, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

Sekiro is set in Edo era Japan in the land of Ashina. You play as the Shinobi “Wolf” Sekiro. Your tasked to protect the Young Lord “Kuro.” You start the game and get your arm cut off. You wake up in a temple with a new prosthetic arm. You spend the rest of the game getting new attachments for this arm like an axe, throwing stars, an actual flamethrower, and much more. Your goal is to find Kuro and do his bidding.

Now for the games difficulty level. It’s hard, Like really hard. You’ll die a lot in the game. But That’s what the game is based around. As the name implies “Shadows die twice” after you die once you have you ability to come back to life. The game is based around this mechanic of being back-breakingly difficult, but you have the crutch of coming back. However, even with this ability, the game is still hard. Some bosses will take 5, 10 ,15 , 20 tries to beat and the game is not too forgiving about this. The Bosses will down talk you, try to make you mad, make you want to quit. But if you push through you get closer each time, one more hit, one more step closer to victory and eventually, you win. You feel like you’ve done the impossible with all of the odds stacked against you, but you persisted and eventually are rewarded with this sense of relief and accomplishment.

However we’re not all perfect and sometimes the game will get to you and you will get mad. This is kind of what makes the game suck, it doesn’t always feel like the risk is equal to the reward. The story is also pretty hard to understand because you really need to look in the right places to understand what’s going on because the game won’t just tell it to you. There is also a problem where you will get lost quite a lot. Sometimes you’ll be thinking your going the right way but the game says you need to go and do something completely different that makes practically zero sense.

With the infuriating difficulty, the cryptic story and the confusing world I’ll have to give Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice a 3/5.