Nioh review – samurai adventure much more than a Dark Souls clone

Team Ninja's unforgiving role-playing action adventure set in feudal Japan owes a debt to the Dark Souls series, but with a tone and narrative of its own

When a demo for Nioh first appeared back in April 2016, the gaming population was somewhat confused. After all, this was a project that was supposed to have perished in development hell over a decade before.

Through its tumultuous development period, Nioh underwent countless iterations, beginning as a tie-in with an unmade Akira Kurosawa movie, and eventually landing on a model that resembled the famed Dark Souls series - mechanically and aesthetically. Both Nioh and Dark Souls are set amid ruin and gothic despair, and both feature a stranger in a strange land, struggling onwards through a quest for salvation, facing monstrous creatures and demons alike.