Onimusha: Way of the Sword preview: lots of slashing and soul collecting

Onimusha: Way of the Sword is Capcom’s latest action-adventure game that looks very, very soulslike.

At Summer Game Fest 2025 I got to see a new demo for the game that showed us the kind of mechanics and gameplay we can expect from the full release, and I’m honestly intrigued.

Things kicked off simply enough, with a brisk walk through the forest slashing unsuspecting enemies and going over the general rules of combat.

Miyamoto Musashi, the game’s protagonist, possesses a special gauntlet that imbues him with supernatural powers, allowing him to harvest souls from slain foes. The souls can then be used for upgrades.

What was very interesting to me was the way souls were collected, as unlike other games that’d automatically deposit them into your inventory Onimusha: Way of the Sword has the player manually absorb them, and if they were too slow to do so some enemies absorbed them first to gain deadlier abilities.

What’s more is certain attacks actually yielded more souls from fallen enemies, but from the look of things they were slower and didn’t do as much damage.

An example was in one of the boss fights where a demon emerged from a rift in the air. After some flashy deflecting of the monster’s weapon, which looked incredibly cool as sparks went flying off the two blades, time slowed to a crawl as the player selected between a red and purple attack. The red move was more destructive and took more health away from the beast, whereas the purple one saw souls explode out of the creature for collection.

It was very impressive, and while I’d need to get some hands-on with the game to see how it all feels it looked like an interesting way of innovating the hack-and-slash gameplay so many other titles have made us accustomed to.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword comes out sometime in 2026, but despite that the demo looked incredibly polished, it’s definitely one to keep an eye on.