New Testaments is a new monthly column in which Amr Al-Aaser presents an overlooked modern game and explicates its best ideas.
Nioh is the kind of game that this column exists for. On release it quickly saw itself buried beneath the comparisons to Dark Souls, praised for the ways it imitated the series, and criticised for its failings in repeating From Software’s successes. But while Nioh clearly follows in the precedent set for the genre by Dark Souls, it does so in the same way something like Monolith’s BLOOD follows Doom: with a clear lineage, but with very different aims and aesthetic goals.
Nothing illustrates this difference in attitude more than the ki pulse.
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