THE TIMED BLOCK

Choose the right moment, and you can topple gods.

- Harvey Randall

I finished Nine Sols just before 2024 ended —and I'm glad I did, because it’s one of my favorite games of the year. Partially because of its gorgeous art direction, solid story, and exceptional fight design. But also because it happens to be following a trend that is downright pleasing to me: the Soulslike genre is looking a whole lot more Sekirolike, lately.

In case you missed FromSoftware’s masterwork, here's a basic explanation. In Sekiro, your objective isn’t just to reduce your enemy's health bar to zero—it’s to break their posture. To do so, you need to apply damage to it. Taking chips off their health will accomplish this, but the real name of the game is timing your blocks just-so. The window to pull one off is far more forgiving than the all-or-nothing parries of past Souls games, and the reward for doing so is proportionately smaller.