In Sekiro you play a shinobi on a quest for vengeance. An army of enemy soldiers and monsters stand in the way, but they can’t fight you if they can’t see you. You can battle everyone face to face if you want to, but why risk your life when you can stealthily avoid enemies, or kill them instantly from the shadows?

The dark fantasy world of Sekiro has many places to hide. Crouching in the long grass makes you practically invisible. You can use this position of safety to observe enemies in an area and look for routes past them. If you catch an enemy in the long grass you can kill them instantly with a Deathblow finisher from stealth.

Your shinobi can also grapple up to high ground. In forested areas high branches offer stealthy pathways that can help you to evade enemies. Alternatively you can position yourself directly above an enemy to open up an insta-kill drop attack. In tiered temple areas you can use your grapple to approach rooftops from unexpected angles and attack enemies in the back for an instant kill.

Whenever an opponent’s back is exposed you have a chance to take them out. A gas explosion in the middle of combat can hide your position and let you get some sneaky stealth kills, even in the middle of a group. Even if you prefer to fight every enemy, stealth is a powerful tool. You can often take out the first member of a group instantly from stealth, improving your odds against the rest of your enemies. A combination of stealth and outright brawling may be the smartest way to play.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has only been out a matter of days, but modders are already playing with its innards. One of them has found a way to unlock the framerate, letting you run it at more than 60 fps—provided you have a powerful enough rig.

The mod, posted on the Widescreen Gaming Forum by user jackfuste, is still being tested and might cause bugs, but it's letting some players run the game at more than 100 fps. 

To get it to work, you'll need to download the mod from the link above, unpack Sekiro using Steamless, run the patcher and apply the patch to Sekiro.exe. I'd only recommend it you've tried this sort of thing before, but if you're confident then it could give you a big performance boost.

If you're having trouble getting it working, make sure you click through the rest of the forum thread, which contains plenty of troubleshooting ideas. It seems to be working better in windowed mode than in fullscreen.

Tom's review in progress of Sekiro is here, and keep your eyes peeled for the full review next week.

Thanks, Dark Side of Gaming.

Sekiro: Shadow Die Twice's outstanding combat is clearly a hit with players—as of writing, more than 120,000 people are playing it, and its daily peak is more than 125,000, making it the fourth most-played game on Steam today ahead of Rainbox Six Siege. 

It's a monumental launch, bigger even than Devil May Cry 5's, which was itself Capcom's second biggest PC launch ever, topping out at around 85,000 concurrent players, according to Steam Charts.

Sekiro won't be climbing higher up the Steam ladder—in third place is CS:GO, which has more than 600,000 players at a time. But it's yet more evidence, as if we needed it, that excellent singleplayer games can still pull in huge audiences. 

You can read Tom's review in progress here: the highlight is the timing-based combat, which to me feels more rewarding than in any of the Dark Souls games.