Phantom Blade Zero is not a Soulslike. This needs to be the first thing that I tell you, because you need to wipe away any such preconceptions in order to fully appreciate what it is (and is not) doing. The intricate combat and hostile land come instead from wuxia storytelling traditions, and a supernatural martial arts world that can be traced back to the director's first game Rainblood: Town of Death. While "very, very good" is not a genre, it's certainly an accurate description of this game.

Following the events of a prologue I'm not allowed to tell you about, our hero Soul is left with just 66 days to live. This doesn't mean a Dead Rising style time limit – in-game time only passes after specific story beats – but it does mean that anybody feeling particularly brave can opt for a hardcore difficulty that wipes your progress after 66 deaths. That could potentially mean losing dozens of hours of play, so if you opt for that, consider yourself warned.

Developer S-Game is keen to celebrate what it calls a "kungfupunk" aesthetic. It's an appropriate turn of phrase. As I explore the Phantom Realm, meeting new people and chopping them up, I find characters and locations that subtly fuse nature, supernatural horror, Chinese history and mythology, and a hint of the modern world. I fight faceless warriors wielding blades, phantoms playing pipas, deformed monstrosities that could never be mistaken for human, and much more. All this across locations including cliffs, a lake, fields, villages, caverns, and a lavish estate.

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