Teaching How to Play: Sekiro

Words: 4846 Approximate Reading Time: 35-40 minutes

One of the odd things about this project is the way in which forcing yourself to imagine what a new player might do is consistently undone by your own knowledge. In many cases it’s easy to notice certain lessons of design with hindsight, having spent all of this time thinking about these problems and having played the game so many times. Whereas a new player can easily overlook or miss things because they don’t know what they’re doing.

Analyzing Sekiro really highlights this discrepancy. Not because Sekiro is strictly speaking built in a way that prioritizes “veterans.” Unlike when I talked about how the tutorial for Dark Souls III was genuinely built for players who were already familiar with the genre, Sekiro still has to educate players, because it is a very different game. Indeed, one where a lack of knowledge may be preferable.

No, the problem is that Sekiro’s instructions are…odd. Not necessarily the actual explanations, but their placement. Several things can go unexplained simply because you missed them. These are elements that you can discover for yourself, so it’s not like you’ll completely miss them. But how the opening is structured sometimes feels at odds with teaching. It’s occasional, but enough to provide a lasting impression.

Playing Sekiro with all of this knowledge is also tough because it is the one that most rewards having a sense about how to fight. While all of these games have relied on the player’s ability to predict attacks and find openings, Sekiro specifically has a very particular rhythm that needs to be mastered. And that rhythm is harder to fully grasp, because it relies on more precise timing and is perhaps even unintuitive. In turn, this means that knowing how the game teaches the player that rhythm is tough – to what extent is a given lesson something that is really there, or something imagined because I’ve figured out the rhythm?

Perhaps much of this will make more sense with explanation.

Tutorialization and Game Needs

I’m going to go back to the idea of a game’s “needs” with regards to what it means to be an expert player, and how a game must slowly get a player to that expertise.

The FromSoftware games have a set of shared needs, and we can think about how some of those shared needs are morphed by Sekiro’s particular systems.

And so to begin, Sekiro needs to prepare players for a challenge. Perseverance is a necessary skill that the player must adopt for the playthrough, as there is a process of encountering new areas and enemies and bosses, fighting and dying, and then reviving at the last checkpoint to try again. If players are caught off-guard by difficulty, they are more likely to abandon the game when it gets difficult. If they are introduced to the idea early, they can A) more easily decide if the game is right for them, and B) become mentally prepared for what will happen in the rest of the game.

Second, Sekiro should encourage players to explore and look around. This part is important both for finding useful goodies, as well as avoiding traps. But especially relevant here is how Sekiro is much more “three-dimensional” than its predecessors. While all of the “Soulsborne” games are 3D, gameplay largely takes place on a flat plane. The player can climb ladders, ride elevators, or even go up and down stairs, but those telltale signs of ascent and descent can always be found at or around eye level.

In comparison, Sekiro adds a great deal of verticality to its world and exploration, because the player is given access to a tool that allows them to pull themselves to various ledges. And unsurprisingly, the game places a lot of items and even NPCs in these high or low spots. Which means you not only need to look straight, but up and down as well. Something that we often don’t think to do, because so many problems exist in front of us. So Sekiro needs to not only get you to look “around” in a vague sense, but to genuinely look all around.

The third thing these games have needed is to get players to think about their toolsets and employing different strategies against a given problem. To not just bash your head against the wall by doing the same thing over and over. And in Sekiro’s case, a good deal of that strategizing comes from the various secondary weapons known as Prosthetic Tools that the player acquires throughout the game. Many of which are found through exploration, reiterating the importance of combing through the world.

Many of those tools have very particular uses that the game may or may not directly indicate. In some cases, the player may need to figure out how things work and experiment with how the systems work. Or a given tool may have a special use that is not immediately obvious. But of course, it’s not enough to just put that responsibility on the player: the game needs to get you into the habit of either A) continually experimenting with the tools until you get a desired effect, or B) spotting possible opportunities to try specific tools out.

We might also think about how the particular rhythm of combat should be effectively communicated to the player. In a sense, the game attempts to communicate that you need to trade blows with your opponents: attacking, then deflecting the enemy’s attack, and then attacking back, and so on and on. Sometimes the exact pattern differs, but the basic idea of making those trades against an enemy is what the game is trying to push. Once you have that framework in mind, you can reliably tackle just about any enemy in the game. But the game has to get players up to speed here: if you’re just blocking and waiting for openings or hammering attacks, then you’re basically guaranteed to struggle with the combat.

So we understand what we need to learn, but how well does the game actually get these lessons across?

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Sekiro begins with your character in a well. You are directed to a small light on the ground which is an item you can pick up – a letter for you – and then to a ledge in front of you. This and the next ledge immediately communicate the role of jumping and climbing. They similarly give you a small heads up about what a “climbable” ledge is. You’ll learn about climbing and hanging on ledges more directly, but already you are being given hints to be on the lookout for scratches on the walls and rocks.

The same is true once we exit the well. We are then given an opportunity to sidle along a wall, complete with an indication about what walls provide passage along cliffs. We are then brought to a clump of tall reeds and given a prompt to sneak, giving us an immediate indication of how stealth works. When you’re in certain kinds of cover, you are “hidden,” complete with a blurring effect around the edges of the screen (a common method used by other games to communicate stealth).

We make our way through, getting an opportunity to eavesdrop on a couple of enemies and thus learn about some of the utility of stealth. The rest of this opening sequence takes us past several more ledges, giving us more practice with jumping and gives us more indications about what climbable ledges look like. We reach a building with the Divine Child, the character we are supposed to protect throughout the game, who provides us with our sword. He also gives us the Healing Gourd, which we probably wind up using immediately since this entire time we’ve had practically no health.

At this point we could either head up the stairs that are next to us, or use the door. The stairs lead to a dead end with an item, while the door leads outside. Outside are a few enemies, slowly introducing us to combat mechanics. Attacking comes first, with the first couple of enemies going down as we just mash the attack button. These two enemies have a similar look – wearing armor with no hat, and wildly swinging their swords – which gives us something to look out for in the future: these enemies are easy to take down quickly. It also introduces us to the posture gauge. Posture being a secondary “life” bar that, when filled up, causes an enemy’s guard to break and rendering them vulnerable. Understanding posture is important, and slowly we’ll get a sense about how it works.

Progressing just a bit further has us encountering a new enemy: with a hat! We are also given a message about blocking and deflecting attacks. Which is important, because this enemy will actually deflect our attacks. So just mashing attack won’t work, as after one or two blocks the enemy will slash at us well before we can attack again. This provides us with our first indication about the rhythm for fighting. We’re supposed to engage in this trade, attacking a time or two and then deflecting when the enemy strikes back. Generally a single round of this is enough to break the enemy’s posture and kill him.

Then we get some more enemies, now attacking us together rather than one at a time. Which gives us a preliminary taste of fighting multiple enemies at once, which is something we’ll do quite a bit. And then we get our first miniboss…

The miniboss teaches us a few things. We are given a tutorial message about counterattacks: if we deflect an enemy’s attack, then we can hit back quickly. This message is again supposed to indicate the value of that rhythm I’ve been talking about. And indeed the enemy’s attack pattern is generally slow, giving us plenty of attempts to try this new idea out. However, it isn’t foolproof: sometimes the enemy will strike twice in a row despite the attacks being deflected, indicating that we still need to pay attention and learn enemy attack patterns.

Once we manage the break the enemy’s posture and stab him fatally…we find that it isn’t actually all that fatal. Which then pops up a tutorial message about how stronger enemies have multiple health bars that we need to work through. So we’ll have to repeat the process to actually win.

Once we do and get our reward, we continue forward and reach a bridge that we can climb up. This bit is trying to get us to think about “looking up” to find pathways, rather than just sticking to the ground we’re standing on. We get another eavesdrop opportunity, a weird enemy waiting under the bridge, and eventually we reach a door that is our goal. We summon the Divine Child, and make our way through a tunnel to face our first boss: Genichiro.

People who are familiar with FromSoft games most likely know what to expect: death. This fight is difficult, and just shy of unwinnable, especially with so little health and healing items. Even if we haven’t died before, we’re likely to die here. Indeed, if we haven’t died as of yet then we’re even more likely to die here, because we’ve probably used up our healing items and have lost much of our health.

Dying treats us to a cutscene that indicates this was supposed to happen. Our character loses his left arm and passes out, while the Divine Child gets kidnapped. We then wake up in a strange place with a new left arm, and an NPC waiting right in front of us.

The Prosthetic and Level Design

The NPC explains to us that our new arm is called the Shinobi Prosthetic, and has several neat features. We can fit some extra tools into it to make us more powerful, and also we can use it to traverse pits and chasms. We don’t quite know how this works, but the game will teach us soon enough.

Outside this little temple we encounter our first Sculptor’s Idol, which serves as our rest and teleportation point. If we head up a small hill, we find a shrine that will allow us to buy items that might otherwise be permanently lost to us. We might not ever make use of this shrine, but it might be worth visiting now and then. But more important here is a dude named Hanbei who initially asks us to fight him. When we kill him, he pops right back to life. He offers that maybe he could serve as a sort of training dummy so that we can practice our moves, which is actually a pretty useful mechanic. So our new player might take advantage of these practice sessions.

The other clear pathway past the Idol takes us to a gap and gives us a green circular marker, and we get a message about how to use that Prosthetic to get around. So here we know what to look out for and what to do. Not to mention that the marker is placed above us, enough so that it can serve as a reminder that we need to look around and especially up.

Here we find ourselves in a decently-sized opening zone. To say there are “a few directions” to go would not quite be right, as there aren’t really “paths” here. Technically there’s a top route or bottom route, but that still leaves open the fact that those routes are still fairly open. Not incredibly open…but enough.

And so we do run into a slight issue. There’s actually another tutorial message here…which you can miss. One which tells you how to perform stealth attacks. Admittedly you can figure this out on your own, but it highlights a particular weakness of the design here. In fact, this starting area is open in a way that absolutely relies on exploration, and yet isn’t necessarily built to encourage that exploration. There’s not necessarily any reason to double back, and yet by doubling back and taking other routes you can see certain pathways or openings you might not otherwise notice.

For example, our first Prosthetic Tool, the shuriken. At the end of this first section before our next miniboss, we see a gate with a hole in the middle. The gate itself is open, and we could also have traversed all along the top route. So three ways to get past the gate…and yet only one of those pathways (the hole in the middle) takes us to an item which contains our first secondary weapon. Technically this rewards exploration, but since we’ve yet to be fully trained to explore, and this section doesn’t exactly teach us to explore effectively, it’s certainly plausible to miss this item.

If we do pick up that tool, though, we might want to head back to the NPC in the temple to fit it into our arm, which introduces us to how these tools work – we have limited use of them, but they do have a variety of different effects, and if we get more we can equip up to three at a time and switch between them.

And getting the shuriken could well help us with this next miniboss. We get a message here about “perilous attacks,” special attacks that enemies use which are dangerous and unblockable, and we need to avoid them in different ways. Most useful here is the information about sweep attacks, which we need to jump over. This guy is going to be more aggressive, and so will serve as an initial test of our knowledge of combat and the Posture Gauge. But I mention the shuriken because sometimes this enemy might step back to do a little “recharge” move, where he regains some of his posture. This can be interrupted by any attack…including from a shuriken. So learning to think about how we can use our tools to our advantage is certainly an indirect lesson here.

We then get to the next miniature zone with more enemies and items and so on. If we are fairly thorough, we can find a couple useful things. One is a couple NPCs at the bottom of our pathway, a young man and an old lady. The old lady gives us a bell charm and asks us to offer it to Buddha…and we might have noticed (or been notified of) a Buddha statue back at the temple where we began. And indeed if we head back we can interact with the statue and find that it warps us to a new area. More on this later.

The other useful thing we can find is a merchant. Located at the top of a cliff, this merchant sells us another Prosthetic Tool – a set of firecrackers. These will be quite useful later, and while we have an opportunity to get them later, finding them here is far better. And yet if we’ve not really gotten a grasp of the whole “looking up” thing, we could very easily miss this merchant.

But let’s move on from that. We’ll move forward a bit, find our next Idol, and then head back and use that bell charm and explore this new area a bit.

Split Exploration

Waaaaay back in Demon’s Souls, we got a very brief look at the splitting of paths for players to explore. This kind of splitting is actually common to the various FromSoft games, but usually comes with a few components to make it manageable for the players. Firstly, exploration tends to come a bit later in the game, when the player has already been introduced to a lot of the basic concepts. There are cases – as we saw with Dark Souls and Dark Souls II – where the splitting occurs fairly quickly, but in those cases the game tends to place more difficult encounters on certain paths to push players in a particular direction. Secondly, there tends to be some way to understand when you are “ready” for a given zone. These signs rely on rather implicit markers, such as how much experience enemies give or how much damage they do. And thirdly, exploration tends to be about “completing” a zone. Sometimes the end of one zone marks the beginning of the next, and that next zone might be too much for you right now – you need to come back later. But generally when you start down a path you will be following it to the end.

Demon’s Souls, though, is a rather interesting exception to some of those rules. The game is split into five different paths that are sectioned off from one another, and which the player is expected to dip in and out of as they progress. The basic signals about enemy strength are the marker for where you should be at a given point. But if you struggle to read those signals – or the signals aren’t very good – then you’re going to be lost.

Sekiro runs into a similar issue here, but one that is even more curious. We now have two areas we can explore. Arguably the Hirata Estate – our secondary path – seems “optional.” Which it is. But should we be here yet? After all, surely FromSoft wouldn’t put us here unless they wanted us to play around here, right?

And the signals here are a bit mixed. On the one hand, if we use the classic markers, then this area should be tougher, and thus maybe we should hold off on progressing. Enemies here provide more experience and money than the ones on our main path. But they don’t seem too much more difficult. So where should we go?

Now this seems like a rather simple question to answer: just go where you feel comfortable. But that answer runs up against the next miniboss on the main path: a tall and ferocious enemy called the Chained Ogre. A couple of enemies just before the encounter can be heard talking about the ogre, and saying that it’s afraid of fire. Cool…so we just need fire. But we don’t have any. Maybe we have the firecrackers, but that’s not exactly “fire.”

And if we’re just relying on firecrackers or our sword, the ogre is probably going to prove a rather tough foe. His attack pattern is supposed to teach us about dodging grab attacks, which we cannot block (much like how the previous miniboss introduced us to sweep attacks). But he hits incredibly hard, and we don’t have a lot of room for error. So any advantage we can get is useful.

Enter the Flame Vent, a Prosthetic Tool that we can find…in the Hirata Estate. Technically we don’t need this tool, but it is incredibly useful. And yet, it is not found off to the side on the main path, but in an entirely different zone. Indeed, this happens twice within this area: a little bit later will be another Prosthetic Tool which will prove useful later on in the main path.

Getting and equipping the Flame Vent makes the ogre fight much more manageable. It’s not free, but the stun when you hit the ogre with fire, plus being able to set it on fire after two hits, makes it much easier to get those two deathblows.

And this is what makes the splitting of the paths both interesting and yet frustrating. To some extent, we are used to “finishing out” a zone before going somewhere else. Arguably, this could be provided as an explanation as to why the Demon’s Souls framework was not replicated. Only if it’s incredibly clear that we shouldn’t be there do we give up and come back later. But if it feels “doable,” then we keep going.

Yet we’re not really supposed to be there quite yet, or at least not trying to finish out this secondary path. And here’s where the decision to put this split so early, or putting really useful objects on this path, seems like a bit of a misplay.

Bosses

I’ve talked about minibosses here and there, but we’ve not encountered any actual bosses yet. At least not in a “real” fight. These actual bosses are distinguished by the fact that they reward the player with a special item that allows you to upgrade your attack power.

Bosses serve not only as walls, but also as useful checks for your understanding of skills and tools. The first boss we will encounter, the horse-riding Gyoubu, provides us with an opportunity to use our firecrackers. You did get the firecrackers, right?

If we’ve read the blurb about the firecrackers, we would know that they are useful for spooking animals, and indeed when we use them Gyoubu’s horse rears back, giving us a good opening to attack safely. Actually using the firecrackers demands some degree of knowledge about their range, which means we’ll need to experiment. Luckily, the fight may well take us a few tries, meaning that as long as we actually use the tool, we will learn.

Another thing we might realize is that we occasionally get opportunities to use our Shinobi Prosthetic to pull ourselves toward Gyoubu when he gets far away. And at this point we should have access to one or two “skill books” on which we can spend the skill points we’ve hopefully been accumulating. If we take a moment to look at the skills on offer, we might find that one of those skills is a follow-up attack when we perform those pulls. Buying it won’t make the fight significantly easier, but it will prove useful. And so we get a chance to see how the skills provided to us can be directly valuable for fights, giving us not just an obvious reason to purchase skills (which we were going to do anyway), but a reason to stop and look at our skills when we hit a wall.

Though only a miniboss, the next major encounter reiterates the same rule about using the Prosthetic Tools. We find ourselves faced with an enemy called the Blazing Bull: a large bull with some fiery hay tied to its head. The bull’s attacks give us a tutorial about status effects – since its attacks unsurprisingly deal fire damage and build up a burning status, even when blocked. But by the same token, we can stun it briefly through judicious use the firecrackers.

Both of these encounters are designed to remind us about the value of using those Prosthetic Tools and thinking about how they might get us through various problems. Indeed, the firecrackers are offered a second time after Gyoubu’s fight, just in case you forgot them. We can find a merchant just outside of the arena where we fight this boss who sells the tool for the same price. The game really wants to make sure that we know about the usage of these tools.

And pushing us toward this usage – and this is by no means restricted to just these two fights – helps get us into the mindset of thinking about the options available to us. As effective as deflecting and attacking may be, those tools will come in handy at different points, even having interesting effects. But we can’t really know until we try. Sometimes the usage will be obvious, sometimes the usage will be hinted to us through dialogue, and sometimes we just need to experiment.

Thankfully, the “currency” for activating those tools is fairly easy to come by, as you get some just by killing enemies. Unless you’re using those tools constantly, you’ll probably have enough banked away at any given time to experiment freely. And so the game will reward your curiosity at various points with neat effects and easier fights.

Concluding Remarks

Sekiro is one of the hardest to talk about because so much of what you need to learn is the rhythm of combat. All of the FromSoft games boil down to understanding the flow of combat. After all, however experimental you get and however freely you use items, you’re usually constrained in a way that forces combat of some kind. You still need to know how to effectively dodge and attack.

But Sekiro arguably puts a heavier focus on that flow, despite putting a heavier emphasis on item use at the exact same time. And so while tool usage is easy to talk about through the lens of tutorialization, combat flow is tougher. I’ve mentioned it briefly, but it is still something that the player will have to continually feel out, and will likely still make mistakes. In fact, it may take more than a full playthrough to really get the hang of it.

But how well does the game fulfill its basic needs in teaching the player?

In terms of preparing the player for death and difficulty, it’s definitely done a good job. Making the player weak to start, changing up enemy attacks in a way to disrupt the player’s instinctual approach, and providing an early boss that is all but unbeatable for a new player. All of these things get the player used to death and the learning process. You will die, and the game is not going to pull any of its punches.

As for exploration, Sekiro is probably one of the toughest to gauge. But arguably it doesn’t do a great job. One of the major problems is that the game is incredibly open, and yet that openness demands a level of thoroughness that isn’t really taught to the player. As I noted earlier, you can even miss some tutorials just by going the wrong way. Moreover, the verticality of the game demands a system that pushes players to, well…look up. The game does help the player here and there, but so many little pathways lurk up above in places that aren’t “obvious.” The playspace is pushed out in a direction that the player isn’t really used to tackling, and the game tries but doesn’t quite give the player the tools to explore this space.

And finally, there’s tool use and clever thinking, coupled with learning the rhythm of combat. And arguably this game does quite well, at least on paper, of teaching these things. Tool usage is clearer: it’s given us so many hints and opportunities to use those Prosthetic Tools and experiment with their uses. And by pushing us to use these tools, that gets us acclimated to using them.

But the rhythm? That’s tougher. I mentioned that the game tries, but understanding the flow of combat is something that is hard to grasp even if you’re told how to do things. Understanding the flow may well be something that the player has to just learn over time. It is by making mistakes and changing our approach that we get better, and perhaps the game can’t really “teach” us in the way it can teach us how to explore or use tools. Perhaps there are ultimately limits to what a tutorial can do in making us an expert, even when the game is making a definite effort to help us.