It wouldn’t be a From Software game without incredible boss fights. In Sekiro there’s a wide range of powerful warriors and creatures that will force you to use all of your shinobi arts. The simplest fight, between your shinobi and a master samurai, can be as tense and challenging as a battle with a huge ape-like beast. Sekiro’s bosses are also capable of deception and trickery. Spirits can fade and reposition in a puff of colourful vapour, and Lady Butterfly can vault between near-invisible threads of silk at bewildering speed.

They are tough, too. You can still chain together blows to damage their posture and open up Deathblow opportunities, but while ordinary soldiers can only take one Deathblow, bosses can take several. You need to demonstrate a sustained mastery of your enemy’s attack patterns to break their posture down and unlock each Deathblow opportunity.

This is especially difficult because bosses have access to unblockable attacks. Look out for a red symbol above their head as they launch an attack; that means you have to get out of the way quickly. Some enemies can also lunge forward and grab you. If this happens you will be subjected to a massively damaging attack that can kill you outright, or throw you off a nearby cliff.

You will need skill to defeat them, but you can gain an advantage by carefully managing your resurrection ability. You will likely be able to resurrect only once in a fight, and it’s important to use that power wisely. If you haven’t even secured one Deathblow yet, it might be wiser to retreat and come back again with full health and a resurrection in your pocket.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a rather nice-looking game that unfortunately doesn't have a photo mode, but that hasn't stopped avid screenshotters from finding a way. Jim2point0 (recently responsible for the Resident Evil 2 camera hack) has been using Cheat Engine to take some pretty screens of Sekiro, and has shared the table he used to do it. You can toggle the HUD, alter FOV, and now he's updated it so you can freeze time, or just enemies, to line up exactly the shot you need.

Screenshotters have been doing some impressive stuff with Sekiro. For instance:

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a brilliant game, and Tom awarded it 92/100 in his review. But if there's one thing it lacks, it's Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage.

Thankfully, modder kasaiji has buckled to overwhelming pressure from fans and created a new mod that blesses you with Cage's face every time you die. It even has two variants: a grey face when you can still revive, and a blood red one for when you're finally, properly dead.

To install it, follow the instructions on the mod's Nexus page—you'll need to grab the Sekiro mod engine first.

It's not the first time Cage has invaded one of FromSoftware's games. A 2016 mod replaced every texture with pictures of both Cage and...er...Shrek. The result was utterly bizarre, and needs to be seen to be believed.

Every one of FromSoftware's recent games has been loaded with badass weapons, from Dark Souls' classic Moonlight Greatsword to Bloodborne's whip-sword. And Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, FromSoftware's grueling action RPG set in Sengoku-era Japan is no different.

Sekiro, the titular shinobi, has a special Shinobi Prosthetic arm that can be modified with all kinds of wicked tools. In my 35 hours of playing, I've collected everything from a wrist-mounted flamethrower to a spring-loaded spear that impales enemies and pulls them to me. It's an excellent arsenal, and now a mad-scientist YouTuber is bringing it to life.

His name is Colin Furze and earlier this month, he partnered with Activision and FromSoftware to create functional versions of Sekiro's very dangerous weapons. So far he's only completed the Shinobi Axe of the Monkey and the Iron Fortress tools, but both are incredibly impressive to watch in action.

The spring-loaded Axe of the Monkey is my favorite because it works almost perfectly. If you watch the video above, you can see how effortlessly Furze can flick the axe into his hand and retract it back into its cradle parallel with his arm.

The Iron Fortress shield is less impressive to me—if only because making a shield that not only fans out but can also weather a direct blow from an axe is a tall order. The shield still works pretty well all things considered. It's slow to expand compared to the in-game version, which fans out nearly instantly, and is too lightweight to test against real weapons so Furze does the next best thing and tests whether it can withstand a flame thrower. The result is great.

You can watch him actually making the Iron Fortress in a separate video.

It's all really impressive, and I'm excited to see what he's able to do with the rest of Sekiro's arsenal. It's not clear how many videos he intends to make, but given that some of the Shinobi Prosthetic tools are pretty out there (there's one that causes you to vanish into a cloud of raven feathers when attacked), I'm guessing Furze will only attempt the more plausible options.

But what do I know? Maybe Furze will find a way.

Thanks to Kotaku for the cool find.

Dormant. Sickly. Drunk, lying face down in a gutter. Those are all words that you can’t use to describe the PC Gamer UK Podcast, because it is back and strong like a man who is very good at competitively pulling trucks a short distance. Look. We’ve forgotten how to podcast, and we’ve forgotten how to write podcast descriptions. But we’re back, and that’s something.

Discussed: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Anthem, The Division 2, Destiny 2, Google Stadia, The Epic Store.

Starring: Samuel Roberts, Phil Savage, Tom Senior, Andy Kelly

Listen to Episode 70: A Return here. You can also subscribe on iTunes or keep up with new releases using our RSS feed.

The PC Gamer UK Podcast is a weekly podcast about PC gaming. Thoughts? Feedback? Requests? Tweet us @PCGamerPod, or email letters@pcgamer.com. This week’s music is from Destiny 2.

Sekiro is set in a dark fantasy reimagining of 16th century Sengoku Japan in a world of rogue warlords and embattled clans. As Sekiro—the ‘one-armed wolf’—you are on a quest to rescue your young lord from the clutches of the Ashina clan. One of its leading samurai cut off your shinobi’s arm, starting a long quest for revenge across a range of gorgeous environments.

Sekiro draws strong influence from Japanese history, and from Japan’s beautiful and varied landscapes. Your journey takes you to corrupted temples in lush forests as well as towns tucked away in snowy mountains. At night you fight by torchlight in streets swarming with guards, by day you vault across rooftops and use your grapple to hop between high branches. The world of Sekiro has been built with your shinobi’s grapple in mind. Expect environments with a lot of vertical intrigue, which you can exploit to get the jump on your enemies.

You aren’t alone on your journey. Beleaguered merchants, mysterious vagrants, wounded soldiers, and many more mysterious characters await on your path. Some offer advice, others offer warnings. Some can be tempted back to your home temple to advise you throughout the game. Given that Sekiro is developed by the creators of Dark Souls, you can expect a whole world of enigmatic lore. This will surely not be a straightforward revenge story.

Everyone's been talking about Sekiro, how hard it is, how it trains you to become better at its combat and systems, and more. But let me step back for a minute and point out something I love about the game. The entirety of Sekiro is only a 12.6GB download in Steam, 15.5GB after it's unpacked and installed.

From Software axes a lot of the bloat seen in other major games by avoiding long video cutscenes. There's still an intro video, but once that's over, as far as I can tell (I'm not very far in the game) everything is done via in-engine scenes. Considering how much space video can consume, I appreciate this.

It's not like Sekiro loses atmospheric points by dropping video either. There are still full voiceovers for everything important, in multiple languages. I'm a heathen and prefer hearing things in English, but the option to go with Japanese audio and English subtitles feels compelling. And there are still plenty of cutscenes, with depth of field used to good effect. They're just not videos.

The environments of Sekiro still look beautiful as well, even without a 50GB HD texture pack. (Final Fantasy 15, I'm looking at you.) Sure, things could look a bit better with higher resolution textures, but so far I haven't felt anything was missing. Except an easy mode.

Downloading the entire game on my 300Mbps connection only takes about six minutes. And then I can commence dying, a lot. But not before I'm greeted by an EULA (End User Licensing Agreement) that I have to scroll through, line by line, before I can accept it. I still didn't read the EULA.

Anyway, I'm not saying every game needs to be like Sekiro. There's room in this world for all types. I'm just saying it's a nice change of pace to get a game that could theoretically fit in my system RAM. Of course, Sekiro does screw up elsewhere—seriously, stop building games with a 60fps cap and no FOV slider. I know that can be fixed with mods, but it never should have happened in the first place, not in 2019.

You win some, you lose some.