It has been a long time since a soulslike truly humbled me. After a decade of playing FromSoftware’s games and their flock of imitators, I’ve earned a more-than-solid understanding of how to achieve victory without hurling a controller into the TV. It turns out there is some truth in the “soulslikes aren’t actually hard” line that the genre’s most battle-hardened fans parrot on Reddit – after you’ve mastered the fundamentals, climbing the Souls mountain isn’t quite the impossible challenge it first seems.

Guns of Eschaton isn’t your typical soulslike, though. It’s a first-person shooter set in an apocalyptic weird west, a setup that means a great deal of your third-person melee-focused muscle memory is utterly useless here. While it still adheres to the genre’s core rules – you earn level-up currency from kills, lose it when you die, have to fight tooth and nail to reach the next bonfire checkpoint, and can battle alongside a co-op ally – it has so many of its own complicated quirks that playing it feels like learning to walk all over again. Chief among the new challenges to adapt to is that most of your enemies wield ranged weapons, and so a walk through the Old South feels like dealing with Anor Londo’s army of archers all over again.

Over the course of a recent two-hour demo, I suffered through dozens of deaths on the path to understanding Guns of Eschaton’s gunpowder-heavy rethinking of the soulslike. The most important aspect is, of course, your weapon.

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