Everywhere in Sekiro , people are deeply wounded, body and soul, by the shinobiâs failures, lending stakes beyond the playerâs frustration at yet another botched sword fight. Itâs a game that channels the illicit grit of late-night anime movies through a sparse soundtrack and moments of prolonged silence broken only by a background hum of rushing wind or the scrape of feet on roof tiles, metal weapons shifting in scabbards. Sekiro âs Sengoku period Japan is a place of bright red leaves and snowflakes wisping through craggy, early winter mountains, its muddy forest paths and twisting fortress alleyways hiding otherworldly creatures and human foes around every bend. Itâs a game that blends blood-and-dirt historical fiction with myth come to life. In it, samurai arenât heroic figures, dispatching their enemies with a single, surgical flick of the sword; theyâre grunting men who hack at the Wolf with spears and katana, dying with a wet groan as he drives a blade through their sternum and a small volcano of gore erupts from their collapsing frames. Its warrior monks arenât feather-boned and stoic; theyâre maniacal protectors of a twisted version of their faith (more on that later) who attack the Wolf in large groups and overwhelm him with sledgehammer fists that he escapes from like some poor bastard fleeing a violent mob.
Surviving this world requires of the player a willingness to engage with it on its own, markedly homicidal terms. Sekiro is a ninja, which means he spends a lot of time sneaking around, but heâs a master swordsman, too. His style of combat isnât typically graceful, relying instead on either grabbing and slashing apart an unaware enemy from behind or confronting them head-on with overwhelming martial fury. Sword fights, at least against stronger enemies, are a test of nerves and battering rhythmic challenges, the Wolf deflecting incoming blows, jumping above, and sidestepping around his foe while looking for opportunities to slash away at their defenses until theyâre exhausted enough that itâs possible to land a blood-gushing stab into gut or chest. Minor enemies can be beaten down and killed with a few well-timed blocks and attacks. Major ones, from the gameâs seemingly endless supply of towering samurai generals, ghostly monks, giant apes, and freakish insect people, are a much harder proposition. Making up Sekiro âs âbosses,â these characters can kill the Wolf in one or two hits, can withstand several of the same killing blows that finish off regular enemies, and require the player to supply a long period of sweaty hypervigilance to guide the shinobi in whittling away their composure and landing enough furtive sword slashes or gritted-teeth volleys of strikes to actually defeat them.
To put it lightly, these fights are extremely difficult. Each of them is a small puzzle that can only be solved by staying alive long enough to study the opponentâs attack animations, map out spatial windows where engaging or backing away is necessary, and then performing this combination perfectly. The Wolf often dies in two or three hits and he can only reanimate his semi-annihilated corpse a single time per round. In practice, this means that fighting Sekiro âs bosses is an exacting process of trial, error, and steady-nerved perseverance. To overcome one of these enemies, the player needs to absorb the gameâs button inputs and the split-second timing of its sword fighting system to the point of second nature. She must approach a fight that can end in moments with calm, concentration, and unflappable purpose. Itâs similar to performing intricate live music, alone on stage with an instrument controlled by fingers all too ready to slip up and blow everything if not adequately trained to do their job when it counts.
This kind of stress is appropriate. Sekiro is a story told, explicitly and implicitly, through the lens of a grim Buddhism that takes a notably despairing view of humanity as it appeared in Japan during the Sengoku period, an era when the country was racked with more than a century of war. Like the bloody expression of Christianity during the Crusades or Englandâs 12th century Anarchy period (which is described in entries to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a time when people âsaid openly, that Christ slept, and his saintsâ) faith is expressed in its most desperate terms here. For the characters of Sekiro âs blood-soaked Japan, the pain of existence has reached a fevered pitch. Life is suffering, rebirth upon rebirth, and so a lonely sculptor, veteran of some war past, endlessly carves Buddha statues with âfaces of wrathâ in a futile attempt to soothe his guilty conscious and the Wolf dies miserably over and over, coming back to life again and again, hoping to break the seemingly endless cycle of samsara by literally and figuratively seeking release through the zen practice of deadly sword fighting.
The game makes a lot of room to elaborate on the desperate theological struggle that moves its plot. Sekiro fights a wild ape, frenzied from the obvious physical pain of a sword lodged in its shoulder and lashing out in mindless violence at him. Their two reactions to the anguish of their lives plays out in a fight to the death in a waterlogged mountain valley whose rock walls are carved with a giantbodhisattva. It looks down upon them, its carved smile calmly judging their actions. Elsewhere, Sekiro, along with his lord Kuro, gives up any chance of safety once reunited in order to continue fighting to put a stop to their enemiesâ plans to harness the power of immortality, a sickening perversion of nirvana best represented by a school of monks whose bodies are colonized into a sickly life beyond death by spiny centipedes. Sekiro and Kuro, quite literally, work to stop the possibility of artificially extended lives, seeing this path as an unnatural shortcut that can only lead to derangement and horror. Most importantly for the way the player engages with the gameâs world, the Wolfâs journey is a process of mastering the martial techniques and ways of beingâresource management, mental approach to combat, and behaviour toward othersâinstrumental to the bushido code that would be formalized as the samurai ethos in the century following the gameâs time period.
All of this works to give Sekiro âs difficultyâand its expectation that audiences will devote themselves to studying its systems and mastering its challengesâthe sort of context that excuses it from being simply an exercise in masochism for masochismâs sake. Its theological and historical context work together with the often-frustrating experience of mastering its exacting sword fights to create a holistic sutra of a gameâa work of fiction that treats the accepted videogame conceits of preternaturally skilled warriors, ârespawningâ characters, and punishing combat encounters as essential narrative elements in its story of 16th century war and Buddhist thought.
