It’s Shrek. In Sekiro. Finally, we can all die.

Today on Highlight Reel we have Mordhau throwing axes deflected precisely, Days Gone bike problems, Mortal Kombat 11 NPCs, and much more!

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a fun game with excellent combat and an infamous difficulty curve, so it stands to reason that there’s lots of content about it online. There are a whole bunch of guides and showcase videos that do great work to explain which tools and techs are useful.

There are playthroughs and reaction videos and lore explainers and conspiracy theories and Dark Souls comparisons and lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Those are all great, but here is a video answering an incredibly important question I had: What happens if you blow a magic whistle that makes animals go nuts in the middle of a group of samurai warrior monkeys?

Today on Highlight Reel we have lady guns, bombing revenge, VR ora ora oras, flying zombies, and much more!

Speedrunners use a variety of tricks to reduce Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice from a difficult combat gauntlet to a breeze. The fastest Any% runs now take less than 30 minutes, with the current world record at 24:55, held by Distortion2.

Some tricks involve dying in the right place to avoid a giant snake or using items to break boss AI. One of the most recent glitches allows speedrunners to literally swim through large stretches of the game world into otherwise inaccessible areas.

Today on Highlight Reel we have big dudes with bells, complex claymore kills in Rainbow Six Siege, Sekiro stealth, and Blade & Sorcery chokeslams!

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.

If you've died a few times in Sekiro, then you'll have encountered the wonderful world of dragonrot. In the final game, dragonrot is cured through a limited amount of dragon's blood droplets, which cures the world and all afflicted of dragonrot.

But originally, you had to cure NPCs one at a time.

Sekiro makes it a point to push back at players. From difficult bosses to winding world design, there’s friction that players need to fight against. Speedrunners and glitch hunters buck that trend. Last night while playing it, I broke out of bounds and it was a reminder of how even the most tightly composed game worlds hide beauty behind the scenes.

Today on Highlight Reel we have Battlefield V clips, solid hitboxes, perfectly-timed screams, Loony Toons style escapes, and much more!

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.

The spectral foe towered over me, her sheer size outmatched only by her overwhelming poise. The pole arm she held in one hand was twice the size of my character, and the loose robes and prayer beads draped over her hulking figure only served to make her more intimidating. With a grace that only made her enormous size more horrifying, she sprung forward effortlessly, slowly.

Today on Highlight Reel we have Sekiro combat, Ace Combat majesty, Apex Legends kills, glitches, and much more!

Praise the (modding) sun.

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?

It's a ritual whenever a new Souls game comes out. People starting getting wrecked by the bosses, they take to social media or their preferred forum, and a divide emerges. On one side, a legion of fans crying "harder daddy" and praising FromSoftware for their brutal treatment. On the other, gamers left out by the series' punishing difficulty, questioning whether fairer options couldn't be implemented.

All of it hinges on a key question: At what point does a game's difficulty start to unfairly impede upon its accessibility? Better yet, what would a Sekiro easy mode look like that doesn't compromise its creative vision?

In video games, easy is a dirty word, even when it shouldn’t be.  There’s something about the word “easy” that rubs some players as condescending, something that we should maybe leave behind—except where we shouldn’t.

Like in FromSoftware games and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, a game that finds itself plagued by a debate that is, by now, familiar: Should it have an easy mode?

Since Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice came out, speedrunners have been attacking the game at full force, ripping through the game’s early routes and finding ways to go fast in a game full of difficulty walls.

Last week, speedrunner Danflesh managed to knock out the game’s shortest route in 50 minutes. Since then, the record for that run has jumped down to less than 40 minutes, with the current world record held by LostFeather. Watching the run develop has been pretty freaking cool.

Some NPCs get the shittiest luck. But even among that contingent there's a special level, the ones who really get it in the neck – in this case literally.