'First person Dark Souls' gameplay trailer has us seriously excited

NetEase Games has revealed a new gameplay trailer for Hidden Blade, a brand new first-person game coming soon to PC.

Marrying the likes of Dark Souls and Shadow Warrior, Hidden Blade takes place from a first-person perspective and has you fighting various entities taken from Chinese mythology.

The game features first-person melee combat, where even taking a single hit can lead to defeat. Parrying, dodging, and thrusting are core parts of the style.

There’s a big emphasis on the “back and forth” of offensive and defensive combat, where you’ll have to constantly switch up your approach with swords, spears, and halberds to reach victory.

In that sense, it sounds very much similar to Dark Souls in the way you need to approach it, by slowly learning your opponent’s moveset and taking failure as an opportunity to improve over time.

The trailer begins with a cinematic, showing a character approaching a shrine filled with lanterns. Upon entering the shrine, the character becomes locked inside and comes face-to-face with a bunch of hostile enemies.

The trailer then cuts to the same character’s encounter with a demon using a yóuzhǐsǎn as a weapon, before cutting away one last time to show off a few more of the supernatural creatures which will feature in the game.

After this, we get a look at some gameplay, including the first-person combat, exploration, and some puzzle mechanics.

Despite the first-person perspective being present for much of the gameplay, the trailer also reveals that some combat abilities and moves briefly move things into third-person, allowing NetEase to show off its fancy animations as the character performs a spinning attack or downward thrust.

In addition to Dark Souls and Shadow Warrior, some members of the community have also likened it to a Chinese mythology-themed Ghostwire Tokyo, with a greater emphasis on fighting the supernatural.

Altogether, if you’ve liked other action RPGs coming out of China, such as Black Myth Wukong and Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, this one should get you seriously excited.

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NetEase Games

Hidden Blade is one game to put on your radar for the future

The blurb on Hidden Blade, according to its Steam page, reads: “This once prosperous ancient land is now nothing but desolate villages and ruined temples. The incense in front of the ancestral hall has turned to ashes, and on the stage, ghosts speak to themselves. The thin boundary between man and the underworld has cracked at some unknown time—overflowing out are demons and monsters, as well as the uncontrollable yearning in people's hearts.

“Those who step into this broken land have their own reasons: seeking wealth, seeking truth, or simply having nowhere else to go. With each step they take, their greed grows stronger; with each step they take, darkness draws ever closer behind them.

“In the end, which will devour you first: greed or fear?”

There’s no set release date for Hidden Blade just yet, with Steam simply listing it as “Coming soon”.

And given that the store page is written in Simplified Chinese, it sounds like NetEase will be targeting gamers located in China to begin with, before bringing it to new territories.