Tag:

Sword

Broken Sword sequel gets Reforged treatment after last year’s “reimagining”, out next year

by admin October 8, 2025

A “reimagined” version of the second Broken Sword game is on the way, following 2024’s Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars: Reforged.

Revolution Software hinted at the end of last year it was working on the sequel to its classic point-and-click adventure, and now Broken Sword – The Smoking Mirror: Reforged has been officially revealed.

“The Smoking Mirror has always been one of our most loved games, and with Reforged we were able to enhance it in ways that respect the original while making it shine for modern audiences,” said creator Charles Cecil, founder and CEO of Revolution Software. “Just as with the first game, we can’t wait for players old and new to experience it again.”

Broken Sword – The Smoking Mirror: Reforged | Announcement TrailerWatch on YouTube

The Reforged previous game included 4K visuals, new sprites and enhanced audio. Moreover, it included a new UI to help newer players with puzzle solutions.

The sequel will likewise allow players to instantly choose between the original and revised visuals, as well as choose between traditional and story modes for those puzzle hints.

Broken Sword – The Smoking Mirror was first released back in 1997 and sees American tourist George Stobbart and French journalist Nico Collard unravelling a Mayan conspiracy.

The Reforged version will be released in early 2026 across PC (Windows, Mac, Linux), PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch.

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October 8, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

The 26-Year-Old Mystery Behind A Missing RPG Sword Has Been Solved

by admin September 27, 2025

Vandal Hearts II is an obscure strategy RPG sequel produced by Konami at the end of the PS1’s life. Few played it but many who did will cherish it forever. Now its oldest and weirdest mystery has finally be solved. A reference to Konami’s classic shoot ’em up series Gradius mentioned a special sword in the game’s files that no one could ever get to spawn without hacks. Fans thought up all sorts of wild theories about the “intended” way to unlock the secret, including maybe needing very specific save files from other Konami games like Suikoden. It turns out that they actually needed a super-rare demo disc.

The Gradius Sword in Vandal Hearts II isn’t just a fun little Easter egg. The weapon contains a powerful spell called “Ripple Laser” that summons an actual 3D model of Gradius‘ ship, the Vic Viper, to fly across the battlefield and blow up enemies. It’s pretty powerful and has a surprisingly ornate animation for something that no one was ever able to discover in the game naturally. The result has been decades of random threads across message boards like GameFAQs and elsewhere as fans tried to figure out what you could actually do in the game to trigger the Gradius Sword to appear.

Three years ago, the tiny YouTube account Dragon Quarter reposted footage of the Ripple Laser skill in action that was originally uploaded in 2010. Then last night, Dragon Quarter returned with a major update. “After getting a tip from a follower (who I realize now got their tip from a recent post on GameFAQs) of Twitch streamer Karkalla, who is currently playing through Vandal Hearts II for the first time, I have confirmed the Gradius Sword was originally unlocked by downloading a special save data file from Dengeki PlayStation D22 (SLPM-80471), a demo disc included with Dengeki PlayStation Magazine Issue 116 (dated 1999-09-24),” they posted on ResetEra on Friday.

According to GameFAQs user Kern, the discovery came after finding a reference to the demo disc on an older Japanese site. “Someone on a discord who had some old discs found the file on the D22 disc (which you can get from ebay),” they wrote. “I wasn’t able to verify it personally myself but he posted images of the file, and he was able to open the save file on an English copy and the Gradius sword was available for purchase.” Dragon Quarter has since confirmed it as well.

This is the kind of deep gaming lore I thrive on. For years, random players on forums have claimed to have found the weapon early on in Vandal Hearts II just by chance. Is it possible there’s some one in a million chance for it to just spawn randomly without the demo disc data? Who knows. It seems clear that Konami at least intended for it to be an exclusive bonus for owners of the demo disc, similar to the deluxe edition pre-orders of today that let players begin a game with unique upgrades and gear.

The most absurd theory by far was that you needed to have a final Gregminster save point from the original Suikoden on a memory card to get the Gradius Sword to appear in the shop. When that was debunked a couple of years ago, many players had resigned themselves to the weapon only being available via some hacked save file from “Jean” that was uploaded to GameFAQs over a decade ago. Now players can get it the “official” way by downloading a copy of the demo disc save and using a PS3 memory card converter to get the data onto a PS1 memory card.

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September 27, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

This Tiny Action Camera Got Swacked by a Sword, and Survived

by admin September 17, 2025

My brother punched his rapier toward my head. The blade missed me by inches, but the clever duelist swiped down and chopped at my crown, sending the $450 action camera attached to my fencing mask spinning away. The magnetic pod for Insta360’s Go Ultra tumbled to the floor, the light still blinking red, still recording. His sword left a gash along the side of the lens and a scuff on plastic. The camera still works, so if you were wondering how durable the Go Ultra is, know that it passed the “getting hit by a sword” test.

Insta360 Go Ultra

You won’t find a smaller action cam that’s this portable with video quality to stand up to your favorite GoPro.

Pros

So light and portable
Records at 4K/60 fps
Magnetic mount with wide variety of uses
Durable against sword blows
Fast charging

Cons

Battery doesn’t last too long
Overheating issues
No internal storage

I had been looking for a camera light enough to stick on my fencing mask without rigging up a mount for a much larger recording device, and I think I found it with the Insta360 Go Ultra. The pricey action camera looks like your average GoPro when both of its main parts—the “Standalone Camera” case with the flip-up display and “Action Pod” with the image sensor and lens—are connected. But its detachable design means you can stick the smaller practically anywhere, so long as you rig up the right mount for the appropriate situation.

The Go Ultra doesn’t have all the capabilities of its contemporaries. It’s not the best for slow-motion footage or shooting at the highest possible resolution and frame rate. But because of its light and idiot-proof design, the Go Ultra is now my favorite little device to take on adventures or whenever I next enter the dueling pit.

An action camera for ants?

The Standalone Camera and Action Pod serve as the two pieces to the Go Ultra’s whole. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

The Action Pod can communicate with the Standalone Camera up to about 30 feet away, which helps you compose a shot when you can’t physically see the camera’s orientation. Whereas the average rugged action camera, such as the GoPro Hero 13 Black or DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro, can take a hit and keep on filming, the Go Ultra is still durable and can adhere to any magnetic strip or ferromagnetic metal (though you still want the strongest mount to keep it from going astray). However, if you’re planning to attach the Go Ultra’s Action Pod to any moving object, you’ll want a strong magnetic attachment to keep it secure. Compared to the Insta360 Go 3S from 2024, the Go Ultra’s Action Pod is much larger with longer battery life and a bigger sensor that makes it better for low-light shooting.

The Insta360 Go Ultra contains a 14.27mm focal length lens with an f/2.85 aperture and the ability to shoot up to 50-megapixel still photos. With those specs, the lens fits somewhere in between higher-end action cameras and a simple point-and-shoot video camera for recording your family’s antics. It can shoot in a max 180Mbps bitrate with a variety of preset video modes, though most of the time you’ll stick with either “Video” in daylight or “PureVideo” for low-light environments. With a wide-angle lens, you’re more likely to get the shot without having a death grip on a selfie stick.

The Go Ultra comes packed with a magnetic clip and a necklace you can wear under your shirt. The necklace will sit center-mass on your chest, which I found good for doing point-of-view shots when I was reporting on the ground from IFA 2025 in Berlin. The clip can help your lens hitch a ride on a hat or helmet and still feel light enough you may forget it’s there. I clipped the Go Ultra Action Pod on a thin tree branch and managed to get a shot without needing a tripod. The Action Pod is light enough I never had to worry about it weighing down anything it was attached to.

The older Insta360 Go 3S may be lighter, but it’s to such a small degree that the trade off is worth it. Speaking of changes from the older Go-series action cameras, the Go Ultra doesn’t come with any internal storage, unlike the Go 3S. Instead, it records to a microSD card that slots into the Action Pod. I would have appreciated some buffer of internal capacity in case I ran out of storage on the memory card while shooting, but I vastly prefer SD cards to being stuck with limited built-in storage.

Depending on what kind of bundle you buy, you may end up with more attachment points. The Standalone Camera housing can attach to a Quick Release Mount with your traditional GoPro two-pronged threads, a tripod, and a Pivot Stand with a suction cap. There’s even a $17 “Toddler Titan Hat Clip,” which Insta360 implies parents will hang from a child’s cap facing toward the body to take extra-close shots of the tyke’s wide-eyed expressions. I would not blame any toddler who takes that camera and chucks it across the room. Inevitably, it will be up to innovative camera aficionados to create their own magnetic mounts for their needs. To that end, the Action Pod allows for more creativity in how and where you set up your camera.

Better than most for low-light shooting

Insta360 sells several magnetic and non-magnetic mounts, such as its Pivot Stand, but you can DIY your own mounting rig with a little ingenuity. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

We all want to believe our action cams can take footage as beautiful as those slickly-produced GoPro promotional videos. The true footage you can get from such a small lens will inevitably disspaoint. The Insta360 Go Ultra shoots at 4K resolution at a max of 60 fps, though the camera will default to 30 fps in most scenarios. If you want to shoot with HDR—aka high-dynamic range for better contrast—you’re also limited to 30 fps. For my amateur hour fencing video that I published straight to Instagram, that’s perfectly acceptable. For those hoping for video footage requiring minimal editing, just know you’ll never get the quality you’ll see in all the promotional video that Insta360 shares to its social feeds. You’ll find that your phone may present better-quality footage for quick and dirty POV feeds.

Still, I would put the Go Ultra’s quality up there with the expensive action cameras I’ve used. Small sensors often struggle with low-light scenarios, a problem that has plagued action cameras since the beginning. The Go Ultra’s “PureView” mode does a fair job brightening up images to make them more visible. I could spot a little bit of noise from the video once I brought it to my PC, but for my purpose the footage was good enough to flip over to my socials. As for the shots I took in the dim halls of IFA, the quality was a mixed bag. Some clips still appeared dark without great contrast. Overall, there’s only so much you can expect from a small sensor.

The Go Ultra may not be your first go-to choice for extreme sports, especially if you were planning to shoot in slow motion. You can choose to film in 60 fps, but if you want automated slow-mo video, 4x slow-mo at 120 fps is limited to 1080p recording. Like Insta360’s 360-degree cameras and its upcoming Antigravity A1 drone, the Go Ultra also includes options for automatic dewarping to correct the fisheye effect of the rounded lens, but you may end up going for “Ultra” setting to capture as much of the scenery in one go. The video above used the standard “Ultra” wide field of view, which felt on the money for hands-on shots. With any of these modes, the camera’s automatic FlowState stabilization did a good job even as I was whipping a sword at my fencing partners.

The action camera can shoot in both vertical and horizontal just by changing the orientation of the lens. The default 16:9 shots are when the camera lens is positioned in the top right. When rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise and the lens is on the top left, it will shoot in 9:16. There’s nothing on the Action Pod to mark when it’s vertical or horizontal, and there were times I would lose the Action Pod, reattach it, only to realize I was now shooting in the wrong orientation. This wasn’t a problem on older Go models with the oval-shaped pod compared to the square on the Go Ultra. A small indicator arrow on the Action Pod itself may have resolved this small headache.

Not the longest battery, but it charges up real quick

The Insta360 Go Ultra is about the same size as a GoPro Hero camera, though the detachable Action Pod is much smaller and lighter. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

The Go Ultra can’t last you an entire afternoon’s worth of continuous shooting. Filming in 4K at 60 fps, I found it would last a little over 40 minutes before I needed to shove the Action Pod back in its case to let it recharge. In those cases, the Standalone Camera housing essentially acts as a way to give the Action Pod a little extra juice. But after depleting the Action Pod, the Standalone Camera and its limited 500mAh capacity battery won’t be enough for more than 1.5 hours, especially if you’re shooting in low-light or higher frame rate modes.

Though the battery isn’t the best, the more concerning hurdle you’ll run up against is heat management. The Go Ultra alerts users as soon as they choose the 4K 60 fps mode that this could cause overheating, which would also hinder battery life. Outdoors, in the shade, the Action Pod didn’t feel hot to the touch, but it still alerted me about overheating after an extended shoot. A few minutes set aside in its Standalone Camera case eventually let continue recording.

The latest GoPro Hero 13 Black lasts a little more than 2 hours of continuous recording at higher resolutions. The Go Ultra Action Pod should last longer—closer to 2 hours if you drop the frame rate down to 30 fps and only shoot at 1080p. I wouldn’t suggest you limit resolution for the sake of battery life unless it becomes absolutely necessary. To make up for the limited battery, Insta360’s small action camera supports fast charging. I could recharge up to 80% from empty in around 15 minutes. A full charge takes about 40 minutes for both the Standalone Camera and Action Pod.

Most amateurs looking to post their snowboarding tricks to their TikTok won’t have any complaints with image quality. Those with more professional setups could find extra use for a small-form camera. Since the Go Ultra’s Action Pod is so compact, it becomes another arrow in the quiver when you need to get POV footage. It won’t have all the enhanced zoom, resolution, and frame rate options as other action cameras, but in my time using the Go Ultra, I didn’t miss 5.3K resolution or any of the other features, especially when the Action Pod is so damn light. It’s so small I don’t need to duck into a full head or chest mount to get quality shots.

Those imagining all the action shots they can take with the $450 Insta360 Go Ultra need to remember what they may be sacrificing for the sake of portability. The Hero 13 Black’s costs $430 while Insta360’s Ace Pro 2 demands $400. At the very least, the move to smaller magnetic cameras is pushing the industry forward. Multiple leaks have implied DJI is planning to launch its own pod-based action camera. Until somebody comes along and does it better, the Go Ultra has just the right balance of camera quality and portability.

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September 17, 2025 0 comments

Esports

How Sony saved Sword of the Sea

by admin September 10, 2025

Giant Squid released its third game, Sword of the Sea, in August this year, following on from Abzû in 2016 and The Pathless in 2020.

The game, which sees the player surf-gliding across rolling dunes and icy mountains, has been met with a warm critical reception. Eurogamer awarded it five stars, while GamesRadar called it “simultaneously exhilarating and meditative”, and the PlayStation 5 version of Sword of the Sea currently boasts a ‘generally favorable’ score of 88 on Metacritic.

While the connection with the company’s previous games is all over Sword of the Sea, for creative director Matt Nava – who co-founded Giant Squid in 2013 – this release also marked an important homage to Thatgamecompany’s Journey, on which he served as an art director.

“What I’m really happy about is that the messaging has been clear and people have understood how it’s connected, and that they’ve reacted in a way that is positive about that. That’s very satisfying,” Nava says, smiling over our video call.

Similarities between Journey and Sword of the Sea, however, extend beyond their shared love for hyper-smooth movement and ambiguous storytelling.

“It’s fantastic that Sony has a dedicated group of people that really care about the artistic aspect of the medium”

While the development costs of Sword of the Sea never pushed the studio to bankruptcy, like Journey did with Thatgamecompany, both projects were ultimately saved by Sony’s trust in the process (along with some self-funding in the latter case).

“We wouldn’t be here without them, even before this game,” Nava remarks. “But on Sword of the Sea specifically, we were able to work with [Sony] directly. Halfway through development – as it usually goes – you need a little more cash to get it out the door; things take longer than you think [they will] and you need that extra funding.”

The much-needed financial lifeline emerged in the form of PlayStation Indies, one of Sony’s many initiatives dedicated to “spotlight and support the best of the best indie games.”

Since the program’s launch in 2020, more than a dozen indie titles, including Pacific Drive, Recompile, and Maquette, have received support and funding from Sony.

“It’s just fantastic that Sony has a program like that. [That] this big, powerful company has a dedicated group of people inside that really care about the artistic aspect of the medium,” says Nava.

Becoming a PlayStation Indie

This belief in the artistic vision of Giant Squid “by a couple of individuals” over at PlayStation Indies, then, was the push that helped Sword of the Sea to see the light of day.

“They were able to help us by collaborating with the PlayStation Plus team. They’re different parts of Sony, but they communicated with each other, and they were able to say, ‘Okay, we’ll pitch in. We’ll cover this.’,” Nava explains.

Getting backing from the PlayStation Plus department, which requires a lot “of planning and shifting around [in order to] make sure it works with the other” titles, Nava adds, doesn’t come without certain obligations.

As part of Giant Squid’s deal with PlayStation, Sword of the Sea was to become a PlayStation Plus day-one title, instead of being published independently.

According to the creative director, trading a measure of independence for that critical polish time can be a double-edged sword.

Image credit: Giant Squid

“On the one hand, you’re giving away the game for free to all these people who are already subscribed. But at the same time, way more people are playing it – you’re getting more eyes on the game. And that’s tremendously valuable as well,” he says. “You never know how that balance is going to play out for you and your specific game. It can help you, [or] it can hurt you.”

Although there’s little information on whether all PlayStation Plus day-one games get the same deal, Sword of the Sea was still self-published with additional publishing on Sony’s end. “It’s kind of hard to explain,” Nava begins.

“Technically, we self-published this game. That let us directly control the storefronts and have a lot of control in the marketing in a way that we hadn’t done before.”

While he didn’t specify exactly how much time this deal afforded Giant Squid’s roughly 20-person team, Nava calls the partnership with PlayStation Plus a “learning process.”

“It was really wonderful for us because that extra control helped us in the final moments of getting this game out the door. We were able to do some crazy tricks and get some fixes at the last second. And, man, it saved the game.”

Working against the clock

There’s perhaps no saying in the game development biz possibly erroneously attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto’s famous, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a bad game is bad forever.”

And while exceptions like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 prove that years of post-launch work can work as a redemption arc, most smaller studios – Giant Squid included – don’t have that kind of luxury. They have to make every second count, even when time works against you.

For Nava, this rings true even after a decade-plus experience leading a studio and three successfully published titles.

“Every game I’ve worked on, it’s been an act of faith from everybody involved to believe that it will become great. At the beginning, it’s so simple: you don’t have all the parts, and you’re kind of saying, ‘Okay, you have to imagine [how] to fill in the blanks.’ And then at the very last second, you get the whole thing for the first time – you get to see it all together.

“Now [that] you can see the whole experience, that lets you tune it up holistically. And [during] that final period, you can [make] big changes. You can manipulate the broader experience with the knowledge of how the game feels altogether.”

Nava continues: “You’re also at the peak of your ability to build the game. You know how to build this game because you figured that out. You’re completely empowered. But then the only thing you don’t have is any time. You have to fight to get time at the end, so that when you have that knowledge and holistic understanding, you can make those sweeping changes.”

One of those changes, Nava recalls, was fixing Sword of the Sea’s cutscenes that were always put off because of more immediate polish work on the game’s mechanics.

“For a very long time, the fog in these scenes [were] all the wrong colour,” he remembers. “There’s a scary scene, and it’s supposed to be misty and spooky-looking. But for a long time, it was very clear. It looked like a gorgeous sunset.”

Naturally, Nava likens the final push to reach “the level of polish [they] all dreamed of” to Journey, whose final, long-overdue version left three of 25 play testers crying, according to ThatGameCompany’s Jenova Chen (who recently spoke with GamesIndustry.biz about company’s transmedia goals).

“With Journey, we were able to do that. But that game was rough until we did that. It was a chore. And then it finally came together in a really nice way. Sword of the Sea got the time like that, too, [but] just barely,” Nava remembers. “Just coordinating that last push… it was a lot that we got it.”

Rolling with the punches

Navigating ‘co-publishing’ with PlayStation after bringing the studio and the project back from the financial brink was an important lesson for Nava. But so was adapting to a post-COVID industry, which completely reshaped how both AAA and indie studios around the world approached making games.

“We had a little bit of experience working remotely,” he says, referencing the final stretch of The Pathless’ development.

“But starting a project is very different than finishing one. When you’re finishing it, everybody knows exactly what they’re trying to do, and they have a very clear deadline. The beginning… I don’t know what this is yet. That was where we had to learn just how we kind of ideate and come up with new ideas together if we’re not in the same room.”

While Nava and the team were able to complete Sword of the Sea under one roof, for many Giant Squid employees, starting a new project in the midst of the pandemic was just as unfamiliar and terrifying as it was for the game’s creative director.

Image credit: Giant Squid

It wasn’t simply a matter of adapting to new tools or adding Zoom meetings to make up for the lack of in-person brainstorming sessions – it came down to Giant Squid adjusting to the new reality of remote work.

“It took us a while to figure that out. It came down to [the] way we thought about the work. How we made sure everybody had something to do and they would, even without having to talk to anybody, know where to go next. [We] made sure everybody has the game plan,” says Nava.

In many ways, the current situation in the games industry is more terrifying than it was at the start of Sword of the Sea’s development in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic. According to video game artist Farhan Noor’s layoff tracker, there have been an estimated 38,000 layoffs in the industry since the start of 2022: so how is this industry turbulence affecting Giant Squid’s next steps?”

“It’s something that we’re always thinking about,” Nava admits. “The process that you have at these kinds of studios is that you get that funding, you spend it all as you make the game. And now, at the end, the game hasn’t made enough sales yet to bring in cash because all of the funding people have to recoup first.

“So there’s this little gap where you’re like, ‘How do we keep this show on the road?’ Is there another way to approach this so that we can achieve this thing that we’re doing more sustainably?”

He concludes: “What’s important to me is this core team that we’ve managed to keep together. I’ve just got to keep those people together. So I’m trying to figure out how to make it work. And every time we do it, I think about what was really tough about that.”

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September 10, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Way of the Sword might be a more forgiving kind of samurai epic

by admin August 20, 2025

Capcom’s Onimusha series has been on a long hiatus. Combining Resident Evil-style rendered backgrounds with more agile characters, adding in demons, magic and a feudal Japan setting, the series span multiple sequels — and consoles — til the fourth entry in 2006.

Roughly two decades (and console eras) later, Capcom has returned to the series, even getting the definitive samurai actor, Tom Cruise Mifune Toshiro, to play the hero, the legendary swordsman Miyamoto Musashi. At Gamescom, the company is now demoing an early slice of Way of the Sword, which covers most (but not all) of the game shown at SGF 2025 just a few months ago.

It’s an interesting time to return to the samurai-meets-demonic-threat universe of Onimusha, following a sudden boom in games tapping into feudal Japan. Most recently, the latest Assassin’s Creed was set there, while, Sony’s upcoming Ghost of Yotei (not to mention its predecessor) both tap bushido and swordplay in historical Japan.

While I played through the demo, I made a lot of mental comparisons to Sekiro – a game that’s now several years old and still unbeaten by me. Onimusha draws together similar themes of demon forces run amok, but has a more forgiving approach. Gameplay centers around blocks and parries, plus weak and strong attacks, all while pulling in orbs dropped by dying enemies that act as the game’s currency. (Health orbs are also dropped by certain foes.)

Onimusha Way of the Sword hands-on

(Capcom)

The Oni gauntlet that absorbs these souls can also be used to see invisible demons and unlock areas that are spiritually blocked. It’ll also act like a sort-of demonic movie projector, showing what happened during the demon invasion in the area.

Early enemies were predictably sluggish demon swordsmen and archers, getting me back up to speed with how Onimusha fights play out. Even if it predictably looks lightyears ahead of its predecessors, Way of the Sword doesn’t reinvent how you cut up these demon hordes.

In comparison to other action games, guarding seems very forgiving. You can hold the guard button down, and it’ll block basic projectiles and melee attacks from all directions I spent some time leaning into exhausting stamina gauges, timing parries for one-hit Issen critical attack and batting away arrows back where they came from.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s satisfying and fun, but I’m itching to see how the series will build on what’s pretty basic attack flow. Musashi had acccess to a dual-short sword special attack, Two Celestials, that barrages the enemy with attacks and tops up his health levels.

This suggests more special attacks and magical flourishes should open up later in the game. The preview during SGF 2025 also showed ways to utilize the environment for defensive attacks, holding up wooden boards to block arrows, for instance, although that didn’t trigger during my playthrough.

Onimusha Way of the Sword hands-on

(Capcom)

The highlight of the demo was a confrontation with Musashi’s rival, Ganryu Sasaki. He’s great villain fodder — and has also been somehow gifted his own Oni gauntlet. The duel was the only time I felt under threat during the demo, and even then, I didn’t die once. There’s enough of a health meter to test yourself against Sasaki’s lavish sword attacks and lunges. Once you wear down more powerful enemies, you can make a single, concentrated attack to either glean more orbs from them or hit for heavy-duty damage.

The early taste of Way of the Sword is a fun, easy romp, so I’m curious to see how Capcom evolves the formula of Onimusha — and where the true challenges might lie.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword is set to be released in 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series S|X, and PC.

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August 20, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Onimusha: Way of the Sword is one of those rare game previews that made me think ‘OK, yeah, I’m going to Platinum this one’

by admin August 20, 2025

Way back in 2016, I downloaded and played the first Nioh public alpha. Team Ninja, the veteran action game developers behind Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive, working on a game that took inspiration from Dark Souls, was too much of a perfect idea to ignore. Within 10 minutes of playing that alpha – which was so bastard hard the devs had to tune down the difficulty for the next demo, and consequently the full release – I knew something to be true: I would get the Platinum trophy in this game.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword

Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Platform: Played on PS5 Pro
Availability: Out 2026 on PC (Steam), PS5, Xbox Series X/S

Fast-forward nine years, and here I am, sitting on a PSN account with two Platinums each for Nioh and Nioh 2 (thanks, PS5 versions). Those games struck a chord with me: the mythological fantasy setting of Sengoku-era Japan scratches an itch I didn’t even know I had, and the fighting-game inspired, stance-based combat that has grown and mutated into something deep and mechanically satisfying represents a high tide in the action-RPG genre only rivalled by FromSoft, in my humble opinion.

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I had that same sense of instant rapport with Onimusha: Way of the Sword. On paper, the Nioh games and Capcom’s reboot of its 10th best-selling franchise are very similar: linear, hardcore action-RPGs with an emphasis on combat and a deft use of horror elements to make the setting of Japan in the 1500s seem even more threatening. Onimusha – despite being packed with demons and supernatural elements – is slightly more grounded than Nioh has ever been, though: in playing as Miyamoto Musash, a legendary Japanese swordsman based on a real historical figure, your movements and reactions are more realistic than William Adams or Hideyoshi’s ever were in the Nioh games.

The result, in your hands, is a character that is lithe, responsive, and precise. In a hands-on preview at Capcom’s offices ahead of Gamescom, I got to play a 20-minute demo that pushed Mushashi through a dark, gloomy castle under the control of Musashi’s real world rival, Sasaki Ganryu. The demo culminates in a battle with the storied samurai, and it was in this encounter I thought ‘yep, I’m going to 100 percent this game’.

Image credit: Capcom

The fight itself is fast and brutal: in true Soulslike style, Ganryu gets a big health bar across the top of the screen, and – once more like Nioh – a stamina bar, too. The core mechanic in Onimusha: Way of the Blade is a light/heavy attack system, supplemented by dodge rolls and parries. Now, I’m the sort of player that basically never uses the guard button in Souls games (Dex builds for life), so the dodging/parrying system in Onimusha felt like coming home. As far as I could tell, you can parry every attack from the boss, though some (like his flying overhead stomp that looks like something out of Tekken) are often better dodged, since the ‘bullet time’ effect you get from ducking out of the way and the window it opens up are more reliable than the tight timing required to parry more effectively.

Other attacks, though, such as his more general sword slashes, are more telegraphed, and easier to time. A successful parry will see Mushashi either respond with a dedicated animation and attack that will inflict a decent amount of damage, and drain Ganryu’s poise, or set you up for a nice combo where you can risk heavy moves instead of the less-impactful flurry of light attacks you’ll be throwing his way in the general melee.

Rain on your parade. | Image credit: Capcom

Ganryu is no idiot, though. I need more time with the game to figure this out for certain, but it seemed that the samurai would get used to the strings of attacks – light, light, heavy – I’d use to poke at his defences, and respond by blocking and countering. This results in this tidal flow of back and forth that, when firing on all cylinders, looks like something straight out of a mid-career Kurosawa film.

I don’t want to say it reminds me of Sekiro (there isn’t quite the sense of choreographed ballet or scale, here) but the ebb and flow of combat certainly evokes the more volatile Soulslike encounters. Once again, I must invoke Nioh: the samurai-on-samurai elements of the battle make the playing field feel more level, and tense. I don’t doubt there will be massive oni to slay, too, but I reckon it’s in these more ‘mirror match’ encounters Onimusha is going to properly shine.

The highlights of the battle, in no particular order, were: getting an early parry in and landing a brutal overhead smash that broke Ganryu’s jingasa (big hat) which, I think, left him more vulnerable to damage taken on his upper body; breaking his poise and landing a devastating cut to the demon-powered gauntlet on his wrist with a Metal Gear Revengence-like focus attack, that I imagine will be an integral part of boss fights; and landing the killing blow by walking backwards in a wary circle and baiting the aforementioned overhead kick in order to dodge, and land one of the most satisfying finishers I’ve ever managed to pull off within 20 minutes of starting a game.

Off-guard. | Image credit: Capcom

Miyamoto Musashi is a famed swordsman. Perhaps one of the most influential folk heroes of Japanese history. His skill with a blade was unmatched, and his travels have inspired reams of lore and legend. Capcom chooses to enshrine his legacy in a different way, here, making you feel powerful, smart, and subtle in your footwork and swordplay. Nioh may have won my heart with its bombastic, jackhammer-like approach to its brutal combat, but there’s something in the precision and artistry of Onimusha’s mechanics that makes me sit here, days later, yearning for more.

I think Onimusha: Way of the Blade is going to be something quite special. I hope the full game, with its enemy variety and assumedly larger scale, can keep up such powerful momentum.

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August 20, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Sword of the Sea Review – Beauty For The Sake Of Beauty

by admin August 18, 2025

Developer Giant Squid was born from members of the team that created 2012’s Journey. Giant Squid founder and Sword of the Sea’s director, Matt Nava, is credited as Journey’s art director, but frankly, you could have guessed that just from looking at the screenshots at the top of this page. This is Giant Squid’s third game, but it is arguably the one that feels the most indebted to Journey – and that’s a compliment. It certainly has its own distinct vibe, story, and, as you progress deeper in the game, art style, but in some ways, it feels like it picks up where that landmark 2012 video game left off.

Sword of the Sea is not a wordless story. Occasionally, you come across stone tablets that offer cryptic prose about what may or may not be happening in this world, but for the most part, your appreciation of the narrative comes strictly from the visuals. You are a swordsperson who prefers to ride your sword like a hoverboard rather than swing it on an adventure to bring aquatic life back to dried out world covered with rolling sand.

The star of the show is the feeling of riding your sword. Gaining speed and leaping from giant sand dunes is fluid and fast. New abilities unlocked over the course of the game only make movement feel better, and different surface types lead to slightly different approaches in how to gain speed and height to hit that next destination. Finding those rhythms on the hills is where Sword of the Sea sings, and the excellent pace of the experience means you are rarely slowing down. I finished my first playthrough in under three hours but immediately started its new game plus mode in order to unlock the final few abilities and see how quickly I could get to the game’s thrilling finale again.

While the ease and speed of movement is Sword of the Sea’s primary highlight, its visuals are a close second. I loved the loop of seeing what’s next and pausing to take in the gorgeous sights. Periodically, the game takes camera control from the player as they are careening down a hill to focus on the landscape in the distance, and I was always eager to hand it over just to make sure I could pay attention to what I was seeing without having to worry about jumping at the right time.

The ocean-themed art direction also leads to unexpected moments that are weird in just the right way. Sword of the Sea likes to play with your expectations, and I was frequently surprised by what I was doing and what was happening.

Perhaps the only shortcoming is that I didn’t find the narrative particularly emotional. It is difficult to create moving moments between characters who don’t speak and exist in an abstract world, and Sword of the Sea doesn’t quite stick the landing. I wouldn’t define my experience with that part of the game as disappointing, but rather that the implications of the narrative didn’t quite keep up with how good the game looks, feels, and sounds. I wanted more.

I appreciate Sword of the Sea’s brevity and visual goals. It never gets close to dragging or overstaying its welcome. It moves at the pace of a magical swordsperson speeding across sand dunes on a floating blade at 170 miles per hour (a speedometer unlocks after you beat the game), and it never gives you a reason to look away. I wanted to feel more from the story, perhaps only because every other element of the experience elevated it so high that my expectations were right up there with them.

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August 18, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Sword of the Sea review – heaven really is a half-pipe

by admin August 18, 2025

Movement, meaning and mindfulness combine in Giant Squid’s latest, a game of free-form expression and flow.

What do we actually mean, when we call a game rewarding? I reckon typically it’s one of two things. First you have games that reward you for playing them well: rewards are given in return for achievement or superlative skill – a new outfit, a Legendary Cuirass, a skill point or two. Then you have the ones where you’re awarded simply for playing the game at all, that kind of external stimulus for engagement. The Skinner box method, basically, where you get daily bonuses for everything from simply logging in to maxing out your battle pass. What Sword of the Sea reminded me, as I lanced my way through desert dunes, 720’d my way across cliff edges, nosedived off a mountain face, or just awkwardly bunny hopped my way along a ledge I wasn’t sure I was actually meant to climb, is that there’s a third way. A game that rewards you neither for just playing nor for playing well, but for playing it right.

Sword of the Sea review

Developer: Giant Squid
Publisher: Giant Squid
Platform: Played on PS5
Availability: Out 19th August on PC (Steam, Epic), PS5

In reality this is really a bit of good old Game Design 101 – and Sword of the Sea feels like such a game designer’s game. What I mean is it’s instructional. Sword of the Sea uses rewards to teach, elegantly and (almost) wordlessly. But before I give you an example I should probably take a beat to explain exactly what it is.

Sword of the Sea is a skateboarding game. It’s also a surfing game. And a snowboarding game. It’s also not really like any of those kinds of games, at least not in the way you might have them in your head. And it’s also, kind of, just Zelda.

In the beginning, like in all good games of exploration and beautiful worlds, you start in a cave. A few quick lessons later – jump, skate a half-pipe, pay the mysterious vendor their toll – and you’re out. Rolling dunes – really waves of sand – invite you onwards, to the archetypal opening-credits cliff edge and a view over all there is to be conquered. And then, yes, a big old ramp. Your goal in Sword of the Sea is to return water to this dried out, ruined world. You carve through it looking for simple clues and following them to logical conclusion, and between those two points, the time between A and B, is all the magic. You jump, flip, grind, skid, spin, and trick your way across the world, a needle with a searing blue thread, weaving life back into the seams of nature.

Here’s a Sword of the Sea trailer to show it in motion.Watch on YouTube

Where Sword of the Sea differs from so many skate-surf-board games before it is in its forgivingness. Typically these kinds of games are hard. Or if not hard, at least a challenge, often with that sense of challenge baked right into it, in fact, delivered via imperative. Get a high score. Chase a combo. Survive. Extreme sports like these are extreme, after all, much of their thrill coming from the closeness with which you can get yourself to death. So it goes in, say, Lonely Mountains: Downhill, a game that tangles mindfulness with downhill sports with supreme skill, but which places great big emphasis on the crunch of failure (which if you’re anything like me happens quite often). With Tony Hawk there’s always a stumble waiting for you if your timing’s off, a trip hazard lurking either side of the beat. SSX Tricky pits you against others as well as yourself, always at the edge of chaos, and where the timer is god.

None of these are complaints! It’s just that Sword of the Sea opts for a different route. What’ll strike you, as you glide across that opening desert, is how forgiving it is. Miss a jump and there’s always a way back, a minor detour to make at most. Fail to land a trick and, well, so what? You keep riding, rhythm effectively unbroken. And those jumps are pretty hard to miss anyway: the sense with Sword of the Sea is that it doesn’t want you to fail. And so jellyfish, which might awaken as makeshift floating jump pads after you release water over a certain area, will actually just slightly drift towards you as you fling yourself towards them. Certain ledges feel almost a little magnetised. Little golden prisms, your only currency for spending with the mysterious vendor, hoover themselves up as you get nearby. The clusters of lamps that you light by surfing over them will trigger when you light up most of them. Imprecision, ultimately, is fine. There’s a minor challenge in just plotting a path and pulling it off, but Sword of the Sea is never truly exacting. It’s about feeling good more than being good. Good vibes and serenity triumph over all.

The simple premise: complete fairly simple platforming puzzles in a given area to restore it to life. | Image credit: Giant Squid / Eurogamer

Where does Zelda come in? Well, there’s the lone, wandering hero, the ruined land, the prophesied sword. There’s pots to be smashed, chests to be opened, a world to be healed, with only a series of vast pseudo dungeons filled with gentle environmental puzzles in the way. The question’s not so much where you find Zelda in Sword of the Sea, as it is where Sword of the Sea would be without it. And from Zelda flows so much of the other inspiration here, of course. There’s a faint whiff of Shadow of the Colossus, for instance, with the game’s wordlessness and its vast, mysterious antagonist.

I want to say there’s a smidge of Sayonara Wild Hearts in here too – nothing to do with Zelda now – if only in the way your occasionally tunnelled movement is carried on a bit of signature score from Austin Wintory, developer Giant Squid’s long-time collaborator on Abzû, The Pathless, and before that with studio head Matt Nava on Journey. It’s tempting to say the whimsy and wonder of a soaring choir and twinkling piano in this type of deeply pretty, makes-you-feel-things indie is a little played out. But it isn’t. Wintory is rarely in the way here; the music lifts and floats, and also subtly drives you on. (As an aside, Sword of the Sea also makes maybe the best use of the DualSense’s speaker and rumble combo that I can remember, at least since Returnal, as it plays the role of dedicated sword-board microphone, playing out all the shimmers, flicks and carves – I’d actually recommend playing without headphones so you can enjoy it.)

Image credit: Giant Squid / Eurogamer

Now, where’s all this instruction-and-reward business, then? Well, imagine you’re approaching a big door, the point very much being that you need to walk through it now to get to the next area. But what if you’re one of those people who, maybe a little compulsively, likes to check they haven’t missed anything, that some ledge way over there, which has just a little more light on it, seems just a little more prominent than the rest of the background wall, might be something you could hop on? What if, next to that big door in the otherwise solid, semi-unremarkable mountainside, there was a miniscule bit of path off to one side – the amount that might seem totally innocuous, accidental even. And what if that path actually went somewhere?

This is the lesson Sword of the Sea has for you, and it almost feels wrong to spoil it: every time you think something might be somewhere, or something might be worth just quickly checking out, quickly trying, the answer is a resounding yes. Sword of the Sea loves hiding things – often these things are very small, borderline pointless beyond the fact they’re hidden, and you’ve found them – and it hides them exactly where you want them to be hidden. And that’s where the lesson comes in. The first time your curiosity strikes, inevitably you’re rewarded, just with a little hat tip, a kind of silent designer’s nod. And so therefore every single time it strikes again, you know it’s worth a look. If you’ve ever had that urge, when you were a kid, to try and leap over the edge of a map, to break the confines of the game, to get on top of the unscalable wall, round the back of the walled-off castle, Sword of the Sea quietly, subtly encourages you to do it.

Image credit: Giant Squid / Eurogamer

There’s a minor snag or two, albeit only minor. A couple of moments where you change what you’re riding, which I won’t spoil, are maybe the only times where Sword of the Sea’s controls feel a tad skew-whiff, an attempt at temporary hyper-responsiveness actually coming back a little too responsive. And its final moments, while stunning and necessary to conclude its story of ageless conflict, maybe don’t hit quite as hard as the sheer joy of open-world movement itself.

But then, ta-da! A final flourish. If you’re wondering if you can just free-roam around this game, go express yourself, play out with a little flair, the answer is yes. The answer to so many questions you might have in Sword of the Sea – will I get to…? Will this eventually…? Is this detour worth it? – is yes, in fact. Where once the world was a place to explore with a bit of pazzazz, sure, it eventually becomes sheer playground, a domain with which you have new means to master, your perspective shifted through a neat mechanical tweak.

Sword of the Sea accessibility options

Remappable controller and controller presets. Invert vertical/horizontal options. Separate Audio toggles for general, music, sound effects, and controller sounds. Settings for camera follow, sensitivity, shake, motion blur and persistent dot.

And gosh is it pretty. As well as that ocean of desert you’ll float through nautical, abandoned city rooftops; scorch a line through ice; xylophone your way up giant, skeletal spines; scream across mountainsides. Sword of the Sea knows the power of putting you at the top of a steep hill and showing you the world. As it does the power of cause and effect. Of the instructional nature of play and the expressive, free-form nature of it too. It’s a game, like all of those others, about the deep, personal connection we’re able to form with the natural world by using it, being in perpetual contact with it, or simply flying through it at speed. The mindfulness of giving over a bit of control to the waves, the powder, the half-pipe’s immaculate curve and letting the world move you for once, instead of you fighting to move it. “It’s really about how movement is a way for you to connect with the world,” as Nava put it to me earlier this year. “You’re going fast down the mountain; you get to see all of the mountain very quickly. It’s the closest you can be to being everywhere at once.” Just how good do you reckon that feels?

A copy of Sword of the Sea was provided for this review by Giant Squid.

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August 18, 2025 0 comments