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Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (PS5) by dkirschner (May 7th, 2025 at 15:28:13)

I’ve been playing Sekiro on and off for most of this semester and have gone back and forth between liking it and disliking it. It’s a great game, really focused and tightly designed, no doubt about it, but it is so, so difficult, and I find myself questioning if I am having fun or if I am driven by the desire to not let the game beat me, to prove that I can beat another notoriously difficult game. FromSoftware context: I tried and quit Dark Souls years ago because I thought it was too hard and frustrating, though admittedly I didn’t give it a lot of time. Then I picked up Bloodborne, enjoyed it a lot, and ultimately beat it. Sekiro is my third FromSoftware game.

My first impressions were positive. Sekiro’s atmosphere pulled me right in. It’s dark and gritty and violent, something I liked about both Dark Souls and Bloodborne. I explored around one of the first areas, the Ashina Outskirts, and discovered my first mini-boss (some general or another), though I didn’t know it at the time. Mini-bosses have two health bars instead of one. I got my ass handed to me a few times before thinking, “What the hell is this enemy?!” and changing direction.

I found another area, Hirata Estate, where I stayed for many hours of gameplay. This is where I learned about how death works system works. When you die, you lose half of your accumulated experience (at the level you are on; you can’t lose a level) and money. This means you can grind experience for skills by redoing areas over and over (and not dying!). Well, I was dying, and so I reasoned that more skills could help, so I grinded, redoing the same area numerous times, reaching the next experience level before flirting with the next mini-boss, the Shinobi Hunter, who attacks with a huge spear. I may have found another mini-boss in that area too (or just a hard enemy), but I pretty much explored everywhere I could until I determined that I had to pass the Shinobi Hunter to move forward.

You can’t beat the Shinobi Hunter until you learn how to counter thrust attacks and sweep attacks. In Sekiro, success in combat is heavily dependent on your ability to parry, dodge, and counter thrust and sweep attacks. If you can’t read enemies and respond very quickly and precisely to their moves, you’re going to die. To counter a thrust attack (indicated by a red symbol), you press circle (dodge) just before it lands, and you’ll stomp on their weapon, causing a lot of posture damage. Posture damage is something like stamina. When you block attacks, you take posture damage. When your posture damage reaches max, then you can’t block anymore. The same is true for enemies. Dealing posture damage opens them up to health damage. Countering thrusts and sweeps is good because it’s a way to hammer their posture. To counter sweep attacks (indicated by the same red symbol), you jump as they sweep, then press x (jump) again in the air and you’ll kick the enemy in the head. The timing on these has to be impeccable, or else you’ll get nailed, and it only takes a couple hits to kill you in this game. Since thrust and sweep attacks are indicated by the same red symbol, you have to learn what the attack animations look like for each enemy. Usually, it’s pretty obvious, but occasionally something that looks like a thrust is actually a sweep.

After many hours of learning the basics, grinding, and not feeling like I was accomplishing much of anything, I finally beat the Shinobi Hunter. I slowly bested a couple other mini-bosses over the next few weeks. Then one day, I sat down to play a long session, and I got in the deepest groove. Everything was clicking. I must have killed like 6 or 7 mini-bosses and one of the actual bosses, Gyoubo (the guy on horseback). I even one- or two-shot a couple. I was optimistic, like “Yeah, I can beat Sekiro!” But of course that was premature and naïve! I think that day I ended up stopping after getting killed about 20 times by Lady Butterfly, another main boss.

I abandoned her and went elsewhere, eventually getting to a mini-boss called the Lone Shadow Longswordsman. I didn’t fight him so much as fight the camera. He (like Lady Butterfly) was fast, but unlike Lady Butterfly’s fight, his took place in a tiny, enclosed space. The camera constantly got stuck, I couldn’t see him, I’d lose him, I couldn’t see where I was going, etc. He killed me over and over, and I was getting irritated. Finally, I complained to Google and found that this fight is notorious for the bad camera, and learned how to cheese it a bit. There is a way to cheese a lot of the mini-bosses for some reason. I guess it’s strategy, like if you can figure out that there is a ledge you can jump from to impale the mini-boss and take off a chunk of his health bar, then more power to you. Anyway, I learned how to start the fight with him at 50% health, and ironically I missed the surprise attack one time and beat him normally.

Fast forward to today, where I started in the Ashina Depths, stuck from last time on the Shichimen Warrior miniboss. This guy induces “terror” by shooting you with purple spirits. When your terror meter fills up, you die. So, you have to avoid the spirits and try to close in to attack the Warrior. This is hard because he’s constantly summoning and firing off spirits, and when he’s not doing that, he’s shooting flames from his staff. If you get close, he tends to teleport elsewhere, where he proceeds to summon and shoot more spirits. I abandoned him and pressed onward into the Depths until I got to another mini-boss called Snake Eyes.

Snake Eyes carries a rifle that does tons of damage, sometimes one-shotting me. I did immediately figure out how to get behind him for a stealth attack that lopped off half his health. But I could never take him down. I tended to get myself backed into a corner, where the camera again killed me as much as he did. There are other enemies in the combat area, except if you attack them, then usually Snake Eyes triggers and shoots you dead from across the room. Eventually, I figured out how to kill some of the extras, then stealth attack Snake Eyes, but I could still never get his second health bar down. I haven’t figured out how to counter his thrust/sweep (not sure which it is, but I haven’t timed it right for whichever it might be, and if it hits me, I’m dead). So anyway, I was again getting irritated by the camera and just was not in the mood to consider spending my day dying to Snake Eyes, so I looked up how to beat him. I learned that you can cheese him too. There are pools of poisonous liquid in the combat area, and apparently you can kite him into a poison pool, then grapple out of his reach, and he’ll stand there shooting at you (which you dodge) taking poison damage until he dies. I tried it a few times with partial success. The last time, he was stuck behind a rock shooting into the rock, his life slowly ticking away. I went to brush my teeth, came back, and he was dead. Just kidding. I was dead. I guess he got unstuck and killed me. I sighed and turned it off.

I am feeling very frustrated with Sekiro. Today’s session was not fun. Grinding was not fun. Dying 20 times each to Lady Butterfly or the Shichimen Warrior or the Blazing Bull or whoever was not fun. Dying itself is fine, but one expects to learn something, to do better next time, to make some incremental progress. I rarely feel that with Sekiro. On that day when I had a hot streak, I don’t know what I’d eaten for breakfast, but I was certainly enjoying watching the enemies fall like dominoes. It clicked on that day. But that was only one afternoon of gameplay out of many over the course of the last few months. Can it click again? Can I derive pleasure from trying and failing so many times, only to finally notice an attack pattern I hadn’t noticed before, or to try an item I hadn’t tried before? Probably. It’s weird thinking about quitting Sekiro because I do like it. It’s good. I’m just not having much fun. But the potential is there to have fun. Though even when I do beat a boss, it’s just like, “sigh, okay, here is the next one, who is probably going to be agonizing to learn and overcome.” That’s the thing. It’s definitely not a “come home from work and play” kind of game because it’s so brutal. On the other hand, I often don’t want to play it during my limited free time because I’d rather do something more rewarding. So, what’s its niche? Maybe when I have more time over the summer. I don’t want to give up quite yet. Maybe if I put it down and come back in a couple months, I’ll feel refreshed. Maybe if I try some other games with parry mechanics inspired by Sekiro, I’ll get some practice with this type of combat. Or maybe I’ll try Elden Ring! (And if I never make another Sekiro post, then I probably picked it up for another hour months from now and said “nope!”).

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Griftlands (PC) by dkirschner (Apr 29th, 2025 at 15:53:58)

This is a roguelite deckbuilder that’s neat in that you have two different decks and there is some interesting worldbuilding, with probably like 100 characters you can meet. It’s also narrative heavy. You play runs with one of three characters, each of whom has their own story. Unfortunately though, it never really clicked with me; I was always sort of bored. I played two runs with the first character, Sal, dying near the end of my first attempt. On my second attempt, I noticed “story difficulty,” set it to that, and steamrolled the second run. I left it on story difficulty and steamrolled the game with the second character, Rook, too. When I started the third character, I was sort of dreading learning his mechanics, the tedium of leveling up another set of cards (you can level up each card once by using it a specific number of times), the endless filler-feeling dialogue, and the tons and tons of negotiations and battles I would have to wade through to get to the end of another story that I didn’t care about. So, I played part of the first day for him to get a sense of the character and any new mechanics, then called it quits.

Here's how the two types of decks/combat work. The first is “battle” and needs no explanation. This is normal deckbuilder stuff. Do lots of damage and kill stuff. Some mechanics include “prepare” (a card is “prepared” when it is in the leftmost spot in your hand and can activate special abilities), “gamble” (one character has a coin that he flips, and some of his cards do different things depending on heads or tails), “burn” (deals damage over time), and so on. Each character has a few unique mechanics.

When you battle enemies, you can spare them or kill them. If you spare them, they might hate you (all the various characters you encounter can either hate, dislike, like, or love you). If you kill them, their friends might hate you. If you kill them in an isolated place, well, you got away with murder. It can be tempting to kill enemies because they drop items, and sometimes quite good ones, or maybe because they were real jerks and deserved it. But, when someone hates you, you get a debuff (e.g., status cards cost one extra action), which does go away if you kill that person later. When someone loves you, you get a buff (e.g., gain 4 defense and 2 power at the beginning of every battle). It’s obviously good to have a lot of people love you and few people hate you. I definitely had some hate debuffs that were pretty annoying to deal with.

The second thing you can do is “negotiation,” and this one is different. It’s the same basic idea as battle, except think of it as the passive option. This second deck is full of cards that are meant to manipulate, persuade, and intimidate others. In a negotiation, you have “arguments.” Characters all have a “core argument.” Then, they can make other arguments that do various things. All arguments have “resolve” (HP). When an argument’s resolve reaches 0, it is defeated. No big deal for a regular argument; these come and go during a negotiation. If your core argument loses its resolve, then you lose the negotiation.

So, there are generally two ways out of a situation: battle or negotiate. Sometimes, negotiations make subsequent battles easier. As you think about building your decks, remember that if you lose a negotiation, you might still be able to battle, but if you lose a battle, you can’t then negotiate…because you’re dead. That means that, for me at least, negotiation was far more useful, and I chose that option far more. On the other hand, there are more mandatory battles than mandatory negotiations, and bosses are typically trying to kill you, not argue with you. So, you can’t rely on only one deck; you must figure out how to balance them.

There are some other things to consider, such as the battle and negotiation grafts (like skills or perks you acquire each run), and then the various roguelite meta upgrades. You can unlock permanent upgrades for each character, perks that can be used on any character, as well as new cards that will appear in your runs.

In the end, it feels strange to say, but I wish I had just stopped after the first run. I feel like I wasted my time with this one hoping that it would click. There are certainly things I enjoyed (like the negotiations and trying to get a ton of characters to love me), but like I said earlier, I just found Griftlands tedious and boring.

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Gris (PS5) by jp (Apr 20th, 2025 at 20:25:52)

I distinctly remember Gris getting a "meh" review score in Edge magazine. So, I was expecting to be underwhelmed gameplay-wise though wowed visually.

And yes, I was wowed visually (and aurally too - playing the PS5 version that makes use of the speaker controller in a cool way)...and the gameplay was sort of meh - but, it got better and better the longer I played!

Not counting the "hub" area, the game has four zones/levels that each introduce a mechanic, as well as some in-world things to interact with. And so, the game really goes from less to more as later levels incorporate more in-world mechanics as well as require use of the character mechanics you unlock. It also all makes sense with the game's theme and story and balblabla (ludonarrative harmony is what my students brought up).

That being said, it's a pretty relaxing and flowing kind of game - nods to Journey in there as well - and there isn't really a fail state, though you can get stuck on puzzles and some dexterity-timing dependent puzzles. There's some swimming bits that are just glorious - as you dash from "water bubble" to "water bubble" (blocks of water in the air) - and I loved swimming up waterfalls.

What impressed me the most though were two things:

1. I kept on trying to "go the wrong way" and most of the time, it was the right way.

2. The onboarding and tutorials are really, really well done. You notice a thing, or do a thing, and then that's the thing you have to do later to solve puzzles and so on. It feels very natural and very normal.

So, I'm actually excited to try Neva now...

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Lost in Blue 2 (DS) by jp (Apr 18th, 2025 at 18:46:41)

Perhaps the strangest thing for me about this game is that it's a bona fide survival game on the DS. In my mind, the genre is more recent than 2006! I'm thinking of all the indie survival games (craft stuff, gather food, don't die of hunger or thirst) and then ones on Steam..and here's this game - a sequel no less - and it's straight up THAT. Survival. And there's two characters to boot - and you can die (I did, pretty soon it turns out).

I guess I was surprised by how quickly I did die - and, from a novice perspective, it felt sudden and a bit unfair. As in, CLEARLY there was nothing I could have done differently to survive. I spent too much time exploring was probably the main problem, and I left the boy behind in a cave we found, and I'm not sure that's what you're supposed to do? You have to keep both of them feed, hydrated and energized, and I felt like I had my hands full with just the one character.

I think my biggest mistake was probably not getting the spear for fishing made sooner? But then, I'm not even sure how you're supposed to use it - and all the other food I kept scavenging wasn't really doing much. Like, you'd eat it and not see a huge effect. I'm guessing there's something I'm not understanding and it makes me wonder if a full reset makes the most sense? (instead of loading into a saved game that's already doomed/too heavily stacked against success).

Perhaps the strangest thing (for me) about the game is that there's a super simple mini-game for cooking! You collect stuff to cook and also stuff to use as spices and then need to sort of trial and error recipes - though I could set the boy (the character I was not controlling directly) to cook and he'd come up with his own stuff... it's weird.

And it's a sequel? I guess I should look up if this is a port to DS from someplace else? It would make more sense in a way - the game is also low-poly 3D as you wander around the environment. Still...I might just put it on the shelf.

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Phantom Abyss (PC) by jp (Apr 6th, 2025 at 19:14:27)

I'd heard of the game's hook (or gimmick if you will) as, everyday it's a different 1st person platforming game/run, and if you die - that's it. Play a different run later.

I'm guessing stuff changed along the way, though the concept is still here - it's a reasonably challenging rogue-like 1st person platforming game. I've had fun, you have a whip to help you climb and each level has different modifiers (the whip has an ability) and you can pick up boons in your run (if you have enough coins to afford them) and hopefully make it to the end. BUT, you see a bunch of ghosts for everyone else who played this level - if someone died, you can collect their spirit or something for a small heal! During each run you collect keys you can use to buy permanent upgrades, and so you go up the progression ladder of many roguelites...

Someone described this as first person temple run, which is close enough? I mean, the levels themselves are a lot more interesting than the "mere" reaction times that temple run goes for, here you can side-step/etc. stuff - and there are different paths, and in all you can be a bit creative for how you approach stuff...I've had fun so far - unlocked all the green levels and I've started on the blue ones!

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