Onimusha: Way of the Sword — Three People Played the Demo and Disagreed About Everything

Almost every article about an unreleased game asks you to take somebody's word for it. This one does not have to. Capcom has put a substantial demo out on PS5, Xbox and PC, and it runs somewhere around thirty-five to forty minutes if you take your time and kill everything. Beating it also unlocks a cosmetic item in the finished game, so there is a small reward for the trouble.

That changes what this article is for. Rather than describing how the game feels and hoping you believe us, the more useful job is explaining what the systems actually are, why the people who have played it disagree so sharply about the difficulty, and which of the complaints are worth caring about. Then you go and form your own opinion, which is worth more than ours.

One thing worth saying up front, because it will save some people a lot of confusion: this is not a Soulslike. That comparison follows every hard action game around now, and here it is simply wrong. There are no checkpoint-and-recover-your-stuff loops and no resource loss on death. It is a single-player action adventure with a high skill ceiling, in a series that was doing this a decade before Dark Souls existed.

Here is the interesting problem. Reading through the published hands-on impressions, people who played the same build came away with flatly contradictory conclusions about how hard it is.

One account, from a writer who played both the public demo and a separate behind-closed-doors build at Summer Game Fest, found it far too easy. Enemies stood around waiting their turn rather than swarming. Attacks were telegraphed so heavily that blocking became automatic. Perfect parries and perfect dodges landed with very little precision required. He beat the demo boss on his first attempt with fifteen minutes of his session left over, on the harder of the two available modes, and reported that other people at the event said much the same thing.

Another account described almost the opposite: a game where every parry matters, every missed dodge costs real health, and the difficulty sits close to Dark Souls. A third landed somewhere between, praising the combat but noting that the timing window on the counter move is extremely tight, and that against the demo boss there was only one attack he could counter reliably.

These are not incompatible, and untangling them tells you what the game actually is. Every one of these accounts praises the boss fights. Every one of them is lukewarm or negative about the fights in between. The writer who found it too easy is specifically describing grunt encounters. The writer who found it hard spent most of his time on the boss. They are describing two different halves of the same game, and both halves are real.

You play as Miyamoto Musashi, the historical swordsman, in an alternate version of Kyoto during the height of the samurai era. Musashi has been made an Onimusha, which in this series means half man and half demon, and he is not thrilled about it. The power comes with a gauntlet that talks to him, and the two of them argue.

Combat is built on two attacks and three defensive tools. There is a one-handed attack and a two-handed attack, the latter functioning much like the charge attacks of the older games, aimed at breaking through an enemy's guard. Alongside that you have a parry, a dodge, and the Issen counter, which is the series' signature move: strike in the instant just before an enemy's blow lands and you get a devastating instant counter. It works on ordinary enemies and on bosses, and the timing window is very small.

The systems layer on top of each other in a way that rewards using all of them rather than picking a favourite. Successful parries fill a gauge that eventually wreathes your sword in flame for bonus damage, and further parries keep the buff alive. Around three perfect dodges in a row unlock a special follow-up attack. A third gauge governs your Oni power, which brings out a pair of daggers and grants invulnerability for the whole animation while dragging in a large number of souls.

Souls are the connective tissue. They drop from enemies in several types feeding health, stamina and special abilities, and the game is generous about giving you whichever one you are shortest on. Run low on health and you will start seeing health souls. This is deliberate, and it pushes you to keep attacking rather than retreat. You can now also absorb them while moving, which sounds minor and is not; standing still to collect souls was one of the genuinely irritating things about the older games.

The details are where this shows its pedigree. Parry an enemy while standing near a tree and you can redirect them into it, taking a chunk of extra stamina damage and setting up the break. Break a boss and you get a genuine split-second decision: strike the arm for a larger soul payout, or the head or chest for a burst of damage. That is a real choice made under pressure rather than a cutscene.

Enemy variety arrives quickly too. The demo opens with essentially zombies carrying swords, but within about fifteen minutes it is throwing armoured lizard creatures and heavy weapon users with multiple health bars who are far harder to stagger. Death restarts you immediately at the fight, which encourages experimenting rather than dreading a run back.

Structurally it is a familiar shape: explore an area, complete an objective, fight a boss. Exploration uses an overhead map that shows the general layout without marking everything, which does encourage actually looking around. The tank controls of the original games are gone. You can still smash every pot you find, which is as it should be.

Strip everything else away and this is a game with an unusual profile. The boss encounters appear to be excellent — layered, aggressive, mechanically rich, and the clear reason to be interested. Everything around them is currently somewhere between fine and dull.

That combination can still produce a very good game. Plenty of well-liked action games are carried almost entirely by their boss fights while the material in between is merely a corridor to the next one. It works when the peaks are high enough to pay for the valleys, and by every account here the peaks are high.

But it caps how good the game can be, and it is the difference between a solid entry and a genuine revival. A dormant series returning after twenty years does not get many chances to make this impression. The frustrating part is that the fix looks unusually achievable: make ordinary enemies faster and more aggressive, and give the player something more interesting to do than collect three objects. Neither requires rebuilding anything.

There is one more reason to be mildly optimistic. Capcom shipped this demo publicly rather than restricting it to press, and the criticism it has generated is specific, consistent and impossible to miss. That is not the behaviour of a publisher trying to control a narrative. It reads like a company collecting feedback while there is still time to act on it.