Reviewers Are Scared To Play ‘Nioh,’ Maddening Level Of Difficulty And Complexity

Team Ninja’s dark fantasy fighting game “Nioh” will hit shelves on February 7th, which is a date that fans of insanely difficult games like those made by From Software are already marking. By the developers’ own admission, the title takes a lot of inspiration from games like the Dark Souls franchise and Bloodborne. Perhaps they took it a little too far because reviewers are now hesitant to even play “Nioh” because of how difficult it is.

Known for creating titles that pushed gamers to the limits with the Ninja Gaiden series, Team Ninja has quite a bit of experience making players want to smash their TV screens. With their latest title, however, it would seem that the team has outdone themselves as even reviewers at Forbes are afraid to go anywhere near it.

As far as levels of difficulty that could drive players mad while still keeping them engaged goes, the Dark Souls franchise has set the bar pretty high. It would seem that “Nioh” follows pretty much the same punishing philosophy, but with several twists that crank the difficulty up by a factor of ten.

Following the example of games like Bloodborne, the enemies have huge health bars and can really pack a punch with every attack. What’s more, once the player is surrounded by several enemies, one misstep can lead to inescapable death after a barrage of simultaneous attacks.

What makes “Nioh” really special, however, are the three stances that the character can take to fight enemies. Each stance also changes how the different weapons are handled, exponentially increasing the number of things that the players need to familiarize themselves with.

By combining all of these factors, Team Ninja managed to create a game that is potentially more difficult than any of the Dark Souls games and perhaps even any of the Ninja Gaiden titles. This level of difficulty even forced Polygon to push their review of the game back even though they already had a copy of the game for over a week simply because there was too much to grasp.