Described by PC Gamer’s own Richard Stanton as “Sekiro on a drunken night out”, Phantom Blade Zero looks pretty dang intriguing. Developed by S-Game (and making its debut in the PlayStation Showcase last year) Phantom Blade Zero does indeed look absolutely slammed with high-octane nonsense—and I mean this affectionately. I like nonsense a lot.
Its jet fuel combat had my interest, but a recent interview by our friends at GamesRadar with director “Soulframe” Liang doubles down on a similar sentiment shared in a PlayStation blog last year, and that has my attention: “It’s just like the old Souls games … You move around and explore in a seamless map, it’s just not a huge open-world map. But every region is connected together seamlessly.”
As someone very publicly on-record about my general malaise surrounding Elden Ring’s open world—a feature executed beautifully, but which constantly lies at-odds with the game’s other strengths—this has me very interested. As a matter of personal taste, I prefer a smaller, intimate, connected world over big open fields any day.
“There’s still some process you go through,” explains Soulframe, “but it’s non-linear. There are always multiple paths you can go through. It’s just like the Souls games before Elden Ring.”
Soulframe seems keen to stop the soulslike comparisons there, though—in a Q&A last month, they were adamant that the team was angling more for “combo-driven, heart-pumping combat that is hectic, rewarding, and exhilarating.” The team’s taken inspiration from the soulslike genre for its environments, sure, but little else: “There will be difficulty options, and you won’t have to face respawned mobs after you die or interact with checkpoints.”
If anything, that description smacks a little more of God Hand, a 2006 beat-’em-up often mentioned in the same breath as soulslikes in terms of its difficulty, with long combo strings more at home in fighting games.
Either way, I’m hungry for this thing. I never had the chance to play the OG God Hand, but I’m always a big fan of games that take FromSoftware’s secret sauce and change up the recipe—why not draw on the legendary dev’s environmental design while also doing your own thing? Reuse and recycle, I say.