'Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice' kicked my ass

I had a chance to play Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the new ninja game from the developers of Dark Souls, and wow did that game wipe the floor with me.

At a hands-on event ahead of Gamescom, I watched Activision's Miles Winzeler play through a chunk of Sekiro and then got to try it for myself. As someone who's played a fair amount of Dark Souls games and Bloodbourne, I was pretty confident in myself after seeing Winzeler defeat a handful of enemies and a couple mid-bosses with relative ease.

Once the controller was in my own hands, I quickly found out I was wrong.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice kind of looks like a Souls game that was transplanted to 16th century Japan and brightened up a bit. But the second I started moving, I noticed that this game felt much different.

First of all, the weight of the character Sekiro feels much lighter than the typical Souls character and his movement feels much more free. He's so light, in fact, that he can grapple up onto tree limbs, roof tops, and various other advantageous precipices to get the jump on enemies, escape danger, or just enjoy the view.

As a shinobi (a.k.a. ninja), Sekiro is adept with his blades, so sword arts (special moves that do more damage) pop up pretty frequently, like when he launches down on unsuspecting enemies and pins them to the ground with his sword.

The crux of the game, combat, is where I had the most trouble. My tried and true method of dodging and blocking enemy attacks that I learned from Dark Souls didn't prove to be as useful in Sekiro.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice forced me out of my Dark Souls comfort zone with its focus on breaking down enemies' stances with well-time parries and cuts, opening them up finishing moves to take away large chunks of their health. Rolling and hacking wasn't working.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

And so I died to the first mid-boss. But lucky for me, the mechanic that makes Sekiro unique lies in its subtitle: you get to revive once and try again, effectively allowing you to die twice.

Even with that crutch, I was still unable to defeat the first mid-boss and move onto the second section of demo. I tried four times and I just couldn't do it. With the limited amount of time I had to play, I was more focused on rushing through the fight than taking my time to figure out the nuances of the mechanics, which is clearly what I needed to do in order to succeed.

It reminded me of the first time I played Dark Souls, in which it took me a few hours to really become confident in myself. It also seems to be just as engrossing, and I am excited to sink more time into it and figure out how to beat that mid-boss.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice slices its way onto PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on March 22.