There are plenty of tough bosses in Sekiro, from rival swordsmen to dangerous undead monsters. One of the best bosses sounds at first like it would be the silliest: a shit-throwing giant ape. But closer examination of this battle reveals a crash course on how to make a reactive and thematically interesting boss fight. It’s FromSoftware’s speciality on full display.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice often boils down to intense sword fights between stern warriors, but a little trickery never hurt. One shinobi tool stands out with defensive capabilities that make difficult encounters much more manageable. It can turn even undead monsters and literal demons into pushovers. It’s also a humble umbrella.

I finished Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice earlier this week and had a fantastic time learning its combat and tackling challenging bosses. I’m eager to play more and if I want to, I could start right over with New Game Plus.

Taking that plunge, however, has me wondering about the experience I’ll have. If the joy of Sekiro comes from overcoming challenges, will I have the same satisfaction now that I know what lays in store?

In Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the thread between life and death is tenuous. As the One-Armed Wolf, a loyal shinobi seeking to save a young noble with a cursed bloodline, you traverse a feudal Japan so saturated with the remnants of war that the idea of mortality becomes fickle: dead bodies blending in with the local flora and fauna, so many wounded soldiers sharing their last words that you could create a compendium of the lost.

This is all underscored by a cruel and ultimately gruelling irony - you cannot die.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the latest game from Dark Souls and Bloodborne development studio FromSoftware, is out today. After 30 hours of fighting and struggling and strategising and getting good, I can say I’ve been having an absolute blast.

I've never been a Dark Souls fanatic, but I appreciate the vibrant new mini-genre of Souls-likes it's helped inspire. The Surge is one of those, and from what I saw at E3 2018, The Surge 2 looks like it will be a big improvement with some new ideas of its own.

Devolver Digital is bringing FromSoftware's cult-classic mech action game Metal Wolf Chaos to modern platforms. During their E3 livestream yesterday, the publisher announced Metal Wolf Chaos XD, a remastered version of one of the Xbox's wildest games.

When Dark Souls released in 2011, it helped solidify a new genre of action RPG. Since then, players have held onto the game, with fight clubs and massive, yearly revisitations. Dark Souls is more ritual than game at this point, and it was only inevitable that we'd get a remaster. I think I'm ok with that.

An unfortunate reality of the Dark Souls PVP experience is running into hackers. Sometimes this means fighting foes with infinite health; in other case it means invisible, backstabbing bastards.

Hackers have plagued Dark Souls from the start of the series, and they're already up to no good in Dark Souls Remastered.