It really is Sekiro to Nioh's Dark Souls, but Sekiro is more careful about what it cuts and keeps from its sibling series.

One of the things that keeps Nioh playable despite all its cluttered menus and Diablo-like loot drops is the ability to press a single button that will explain almost anything on your screen. It's not perfect - Nioh's got a lot going on - but it will at least help you understand the value in keeping equipment with bonuses to "Tenacity" and "Low Attack Break". Wo Long doesn't even bother with actual explanations for game mechanics, resulting in a situation where you can read multiple paragraphs about the real life philosophy behind the Five Phases but the actual effects of morale, a central concept in the game, are never explained beyond "it increases your combat power". This lax approach to game clarity carries over into that Help feature too, with most explanations offering up "Health Recovery improves Health Recovery" or similarly enlightening statements.

Combat has been pared down a bit, with the complete removal of weapon-specific skill trees, stamina, and stances. Instead of stamina and limited charges for magic spells, your Spirit bar serves as as a combined mana pool and posture meter, depleting as you do bad things or special moves (dodging, taking damage, using magic) and replenishing by doing good things (successfully landing hits, deflecting attacks). It's a fine system, one that's more intuitive than it sounds because you're likely already avoiding damage and landing hits of your own. Spells, on the other hand, require such a large investment in their stat and the spirit costs are so punitive that hybrid builds are nonexistent for large chunks of the game. What this amounts to for most players is a game in which you have very little incentive to do anything other than light attack or deflect. The window in which you can deflect an attack is much larger than you'd expect - think of a Dark Souls roll that regenerates stamina when you successfully dodge an attack. When deflecting is so easy and actively benefits you, it's easy to forget that blocking is even possible.

And companions? Complaining about NPC companions is as old as NPC companions are, so we'll keep it short. The game is visually busy already, and the companions are as visually noisy as they are incompetent in battle. What's worse, the companions have collision - I was knocked off ledges multiple times while platforming due to my companion landing on my head. I also frequently found that if (and that's a BIG "if") my companions were able to survive more than one or two attacks from a boss, the boss frequently gets stuck in a loop of big, AOE, zoning attacks that make it harder to hit. It's hard to appreciate that you're fighting alongside Liu Bei or Cao Cao when they're getting one-shot by a horse demon within ten seconds of the fight starting.

It's a shame, then, that it feels great! Your character moves like they're in a musou game. Deflecting attacks is hands-down the most satisfying thing in this game despite its ease, emitting a ka-SHING with an impact that has more in common with a lightning strike than two swords meeting. The game feels so good that you can play for a long while on that alone, riding the high of scoring a fatal blow on the boss right when you were most desperate for it. That you can spend the entire game coasting on light attacks and deflects doesn't matter when you're still enjoying the novelty of trying out each weapon's Martial Arts.

Kotaku's Levi Winslow repeatedly called it an "accessible" Souls-like in their review of the game, and I think I would agree with that assessment if we're speaking strictly about the combat. The main issue is that at some point you're going to have to interact with those menus and the loot and the Five Phases system as it interacts with leveling and magic and resistances and it's going to be a LOT to throw at someone who can't touch on reference points from Dark Souls, Nioh, and Diablo. Hell, the PC version displays Playstation button prompts when I'm using an Xbox controller, so something as simple as "the ability to match what's on the screen to my controller" is out the window too. I wouldn't go so far as to call this game "safe," but it's squarely in Team Ninja's comfort zone, and they've done very little to make this game stand out as its own IP and very little to offer an olive branch to new players, even those coming from Nioh. It's a fine time (especially early on!), but there are so many frustrations for a game that lacks a distinct personality.

EDIT: It's been pointed out that you can manually switch the button prompts from Playstation to Xbox in the settings - thank you to HazeRedux for the correction!